Venice Biennale
Venice Art Biennale Appoints Koyo Kouoh as Director of the 61st International Art Exhibition
The Board of La Biennale di Venezia has just announced the appointment of Koyo Kouoh as the Director of the Visual Arts Department. Kouoh will lead the curation of the 61st International Art Exhibition, scheduled for 2026. This announcement follows a recommendation by Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, President of La Biennale, who emphasized Kouoh’s extensive experience in the global art world and her ability to engage with contemporary artistic and cultural discourse.
It was more than 200 years ago when Goethe, thunderstruck by a German translation of the 14th-century Persian poet Hafez, began conceiving of his idea of Weltliteratur, or world literature: “a universal possession of mankind” transcending the boundaries of nations and also, implicitly, of the received history of European literature that traces its descent from Greece through Rome to the various national vernaculars of the modern era. “The epoch of world literature is at hand,” Goethe told his friend Johann Peter Eckermann, “and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.” The progressive value, at the time, of the idea of world literature can be gauged by the fact that this idea found its place even in The Communist Manifesto.
Read more: https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/venice-biennale-2024/
