We are pleased to present a virtual conversation between Alfredo Jaar and Koyo Kouoh, Executive Director and Chief Curator at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) on occasion of his solo exhibition at the museum, Alfredo Jaar: The Rwanda Project, on view November 19, 2020 – May 23, 2021.
In August 1994, in the aftermath of the genocide, Alfredo Jaar visited Rwanda and conducted investigations and photojournalistic field research over six years, creating a total of twenty-five works. For the artist, these were "exercises in representation," serving as a critique to the world’s criminal indifference and a lack of global visibility of the atrocities in Rwanda.
About Koyo Kouoh
Koyo Kouoh is the Executive Director and Chief Curator at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA). Kouoh founded RAW Material Company in Dakar in 2008 as an institution dedicated to art, knowledge and society. A centre for critical education, an art exhibition space, and home to a creative residency programme, it supports the work of African and international artists and curators in all contemporary art media.
In her independent curatorial practice, she has organized meaningful and timely exhibitions such as Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Works of Six African Women Artists, first shown at Wiels in Brussels in 2015. She curated Still (the) Barbarians, 37th EVA International – Irish Biennial in Limerick in 2016, and more recently she participated to the 57th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh with the deeply researched Dig Where You Stand (2018), a show within a show drawn from the collections of the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History. She was the initiator of the research project, Saving Bruce Lee: African and Arab Cinema in the era of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy, co-curated with Rasha Salti at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow and Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (2015-2018).
Prior to founding RAW Material Company, Kouoh worked in cultural affairs with the Goethe Institut, the Goree Institute and later with the US Embassy in Senegal.