Koyo Kouoh: Art is in the cracks, not in the polish

The Meret Oppenheim prize took her by surprise, and not just because Koyo Kouoh does not care about prizes. The Swiss-Cameroonian curator says she never found much of an echo for her artistic interests in Switzerland - postcolonialism, African diaspora, identity politics, for which she has collected kudos in many other countries. The New York Times even pointed her in 2015 as “one of Africa’s pre-eminent art curators”. The Swiss are maybe just a bit slower, as she told swissinfo.ch – but very precise. Koyo Kouoh is a hard catch, always on the move even amidst a pandemic. She currently lives in Cape Town, South Africa, where she runs the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, which holds the largest collection of African contemporary art in the world, and swissinfo.ch managed to meet her during a brief escapade to Switzerland – her husband lives in Basel but her heart is in Zurich, she says, though she was quick to rush to Paris before flying back to South Africa. Born in the...