Koyo Kouoh's Venice Biennale exhibition 'In Minor Keys'; African artist-run spaces gain global exposure
Koyo Kouoh’s Venice Biennale exhibition ‘In Minor Keys’; African artist-run spaces gain global exposure I know why art schools are essential for Koyo Kouoh’s Venice exhibition | Art Basel My first session at RAW Académie transformed me as a curator. The study program is part of RAW Material Company, an organisation founded in Dakar, Senegal, by the late Cameroonian Swiss curator — and former Art Basel Awards jury member — Koyo Kouoh, whose Venice Biennale exhibition, ‘In Minor Keys,’ opens to the public next week. It was 2025, and I urgently needed a space for critical discussion and rest, away from my work in Nigeria. The year before, I had juggled curating the exhibition, ‘Arewa?’, at the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art in Lagos and a festival in Abuja, while working to shape resilient arts and cultural policy in my role as Director of Arts at the capital’s African School of Economics. In seminars at RAW, with nine other brilliant artists, writers, and cultural practitioners from around the world, I discussed everything from the structures that make hospitality possible in cities, to fragmented ways of exhibition-making. Our group took walking tours of Dakar and sat under the mango trees in RAW’s courtyard while our tutor played songs by the American soul legend Sam Cooke, the Argentine folk singer Mercedes Sosa, and the Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti, whose lyrics echoed the possible futures we discussed. We learnt how to make the Senegalese national dish ofthieboudiennein the RAW kitchen. We also presented and re-presented our project proposals to every new faculty member that arrived, including philosopher, novelist, and musician Felwine Sarr, historian and activist Sónia Vaz Borges, and architect and historian Samia Henni. A fellow participant, the writer and cultural worker Mamadou Diallo, described the process of going through the RAW Académie as a ‘fortified mind’ being assailed by ‘hordes of nuanced ideas.’ To partake, was to allow not only our creative projects to be reconstructed, but also our sense of self. ...