Art Basel Launches Koyo Kouoh Fellowship for Emerging Curators
Art Basel has unveiled a new fellowship honoring Koyo Kouoh, the Cameroonian Swiss curator who died in May 2025 and remained one of the most influential figures in contemporary art until the end of her life. The three-year program will bring one emerging curator, writer, or cultural practitioner to the fair in Basel each year, with support that includes travel, a stipend, visa assistance, and mentorship.
The initiative was developed with Raw Material Company, the Dakar-based center for art, knowledge, and society that Kouoh founded in 2008. It is also shaped by the way Kouoh herself came to understand Art Basel: first as a skeptical young professional who felt an art fair was not the ideal place to experience art, and later as a regular visitor who valued the fair as a site for meetings, meals, and conversation. That shift now sits at the center of the fellowship’s purpose.
Vincenzo de Bellis, Art Basel’s chief artistic officer and global director of fairs, said the fair wanted to honor Kouoh’s influence and her role in the launch of the Art Basel Awards. The fellowship jury includes Senegalese curator Marie Hélène Pereira, researcher, writer, and curator Rasha Salti, Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga, and Greer Valley, head of curatorial affairs at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town.
For the inaugural edition, candidates were drawn from Raw Material Company’s Académie and from the Museum Fellowship Programme run by Zeitz MoCAA and the University of the Western Cape, both of which Kouoh established. From next year, the organizers plan to open the fellowship to applications more broadly, with discussions already underway about extending the program beyond its initial three-year run.
The first fellow is Aisha Aliyu-Bima, a Nigerian curator, writer, researcher, and photographer focused on African contemporary art. She is director of arts at the African School of Economics in Abuja and has recently been appointed curator of Abuja Art Fair. It will be her first visit to Basel and her first Art Basel fair, a fitting beginning for a program designed to turn proximity into perspective.
