Elvira Dyangani Ose Wants Zeitz MOCAA to Belong to Its City
Observer ·
Arriving at the museum after years at Tate Modern and MACBA, the newly appointed artistic director sees its historical and spatial contradictions as a curatorial invitation. Her vision centers on collectivity, Pan-Africanism and real accountability to the communities the institution serves.
At the start of this month, Elvira Dyangani Ose assumed the title of artistic director at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town. The institution is the largest museum on the continent devoted to contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora, but has been in the public eye lately for another reason. Koyo Kouoh , its executive director and chief curator since 2019, died suddenly of cancer in May 2025 at the age of 57 . The loss was felt across the art world because at the time Kouoh was also serving as curator of the 2026 Venice Biennale .
Kouoh had put her stamp on Zeitz MOCAA, which opened in Sept. 2017 in a grain silo complex on the V&A Waterfront redesigned by Thomas Heatherwick of Hudson Yards infamy. The founding collection came from Jochen Zeitz , the former Puma chief executive, who co-chairs the board with V&A Waterfront CEO David Green .
Dyangani Ose comes to Cape Town from the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, where she served as director from 2021 until this year. Born in Córdoba to a family of Equatorial Guinean descent, she has held curatorial roles at Tate Modern, where she helped develop the museum’s first strategy for collecting art from Africa and its diaspora; Creative Time in New York; the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville; and the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno in Las Palmas. She directed the Showroom in London, curated the 2015 Göteborg International Biennial and the 2013 Lubumbashi Biennial. She was one of the curators of “Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica” at the Art Institute of Chicago.
We caught up with Dyangani Ose to talk about Kouoh’s legacy, what she learned in Barcelona and why she thinks of Cape Town as an argument rather than a city.
Koyo Kouoh is credited with bringing a new vision to Zeitz MOCAA and built programs like a residency for Cape Town artists. Which parts of her program do you view to be essential to preserving, for the museum and her legacy?
Thank you. Koyo did something that sounds simple and is, in fact, extraordinarily difficult: she began to anchor the museum in the reality of Cape Town. She used to say that when she arrived, the institution had not yet landed in the city, and she devoted six years to changing that. The Koyo Kouoh Atelier is perhaps the clearest expression of it: an artist residency inside the galleries, where artists who live and work in Cape Town experiment in front of the public, and where visitors witness art in the making rather than only its results. I consider that essential. So is everything that surrounds it: the BMW Centre for Art Education and its soon-to-be-launched MOCAA On the Move, a purpose-built mobile art classroom; the Pan-African Zeitz MOCAA & University of the Western Cape (UWC) Museum Fellowship Programme; the symposia; the long-term research behind projects such as “When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting”; and her insistence on monographic depth, on giving artists like Tracey Rose , whom I had the privilege of working with in Gran Canaria 20 years ago, the retrospectives they deserved.
The programs tying the museum to the local reality of Cape Town are the ones I hope to give wings to. My way of working is both hyper-local and connected to an intercontinental reality: through shared methodologies, and through the formulation of common imaginaries. A legacy is not something one preserves under glass. Koyo understood building institutions on the continent as a matter of urgency, and to honor her is to keep that urgency alive. For me, an institution’s legacy is measured not in individual exhibitions or annual reports, but in the artists it sustains, the publics it forms and the next generation of practitioners and professionals it cultivates.
That is also why my first months are, above all, a time for listening. An institution needs time to be understood, and I want to learn from the people who sustain it every day, from its critics and, just as much, from those who feel it has nothing to say to them. They may not hold the answers, but looking for those answers with them, assuming nothing, is what anchors the work in its place.
Kouoh appointed you to her jury for the Venice Biennale. What was it like to work with her? Did you talk about the museum?
Although I learned about the jury appointment long after her passing, Koyo and I shared almost 20 years of conversations, and her invitation was, in many ways, a continuation of that dialogue. The last time we spoke in person was in Chicago, where she was one of our speakers at the Art Institute for a symposium linked to “Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica.” We spoke, as we often did, about the people and the infrastructures that have shaped our field: about Bisi Silva and what ÀSÌKÒ and the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, meant for so many of us, about N’Goné Fall, about a new generation of colleagues such as Marie-Hélène Pereira and about the opportunities for capacity building on the continent.
And of course we spoke about Zeitz MOCAA, which I knew and visited from its inception, although I did not attend while she led it, but which was very present in our exchanges. Koyo was building something there that went beyond exhibitions: a way of making the institution belong to its city. I don’t take it as an inheritance to administer, but as a conversation to continue and fortify from the perspectives inherent to my practice.
At MACBA you were the first woman and first person of color to lead the museum since its founding in 1995. What are your proudest accomplishments from those years?
We restored the museum’s connection with the city. MACBA had, at times, been perceived as an ivory tower, a building that looked outward while turning its back on its neighborhood. We worked to make it porous, open to the Raval and to the city, to the communities who perhaps never dare to visit it and who, in the present, make it, produce it. Fostering that community also meant rethinking how it addresses its publics, establishing the museum’s first-ever development department and strategy, and recognizing philanthropic collaboration as a tool to transform a 30-year-old institution beyond its current governance. What I sought after was not only visibility, but rootedness: the slow, difficult work of making an institution genuinely accountable to the communities it claims to serve. Insisting on better communication with our publics, especially younger ones. In Barcelona we never managed to create a Youth Council.
Furthermore, we presented a program of international interest and relevance under economic conditions that were insufficient for what was asked of the museum; not only to return to pre-pandemic audience levels, but importantly, to care for its own history, while offering a critical and generous gaze toward an international audience that experiences a Barcelona—a culture much more diverse and contemporary—in real life, which was not reflected in its programs. Projects such as “Song for Many Movements: Scenes of Collective Creation” and “Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica” showed the range of what the institution could do. And, perhaps more importantly, we held on despite the difficulties, without needing to underline those limitations at every step.
I believe the work directors do to sustain an institution’s infrastructure and team morale, support their material conditions and accompany them as their practices become more specialized—what Charles Esche once called the “back office”—is fundamental, and we should talk about it more. There was still much to do overall; at the CIMAM, for instance, we hope to contribute to a better understanding of this role. We advocate for public museums like MACBA to have independent, more professional governance, giving their directors more autonomy to operate. However committed a director may be, we work like software on hardware that does not always yield, conceptually or materially; programming alone does not change an institution. All of this generates a better working culture, and a form of capacity building that starts in the museum and, progressively, seeks to influence the sector as a whole. That is part of what I bring with me to Zeitz MOCAA.
You were born in Córdoba to a family of Equatorial Guinean descent. Most of your career has been in Europe and New York. How does that unique vantage point shape how you’ll lead a museum on the continent?
I would gently correct the premise. Much of my work and research has taken place on the continent or in dialogue with it, particularly during my time at Tate Modern, where I helped create Tate’s first Africa Strategy for the acquisition of modern and contemporary art of Africa and its diaspora, and led the trans-local program, “Across the Board,” which connected Tate’s audiences with artists, colleagues and institutions from all over the continent with people like the late beloved Bisi Silva, Ntone Edjabe , Senam Okudzeto and others with whom I devised a series of public programs and research projects in Accra , Douala and Lagos. Before and after that period, I have collaborated with Marilyn Douala-Bell and the Salon Urbain de Douala; I curated the Rencontres Picha in Lubumbashi with artist Sammy Baloji and many others, and conducted my doctoral research on artists’ collectives in Dakar, Lagos and Cape Town, a city I first came to research in 2005.
Still, the vantage point matters. As a Black scholar and curator, a post-colonial subject and an African born and raised in Spain, I became aware early of the power implicit in binary narratives, us and them, here and there, and of the institutions that consolidate that power. In the work of artists, writers and thinkers from Africa and its diaspora, I found poetic and political responses to those concerns, and a notion of togetherness that subverts that rhetoric. That is how I understand Pan-Africanism: not as an origin one returns to, but as a living practice, made of networks, solidarities and translations, including those of Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Africa, which the art world so often forgets. As “Project a Black Planet” set out to show, Pan-Africanism has never been solely a political, literary or philosophical project; it has also been a proposal of artistic imagination, a century-long practice of solidarity across geographies and temporalities.
I find myself increasingly interested in conversations among contexts and communities of the Global South that no longer route through Europe, at least not in the way they did in the late 20th Century, and in local histories that, studied closely, reveal their ties to many others worldwide. I do not come to lead from outside. I come to listen to a city and a community of artists, South Africans, Panafricans and Panhumanists, who already know what they need, and to place the institution at their service.
At Tate Modern you helped develop the institution’s strategy for collecting art from Africa and its diaspora. How should other museums orient themselves toward this material?
Working with Tate’s Africa Acquisitions Committee taught me that collecting is not mere acquisition; it is a commitment to the context and aesthetic environments from which those artworks come, to their histories, and to their agents. Collecting demands research, long-term relationships with artists and their communities, and the humility to recognize that many of these histories were written by or in artists’ collectives, journals, workshops and ephemeral platforms, not only by the objects themselves.
Too often, museums treat this material as an emergency to manage: a temporary exhibition here, a public program there, a more diverse surface over a structure that stays the same. An intervention that does not touch the structure remains, in the end, just programming. Kerry James Marshall is a key example for me: he realized that placing Black figures within the conventions of history painting was not enough; he had to master that tradition to contest it and change it from within. Museums face the same task. Collecting is structural work, and it begins when those who govern our institutions acknowledge the violence through which some collections were assembled, and the erasures their narratives have sustained.
From there, I would suggest three orientations: sustained commitments to artists across their careers, not single trophies—so to speak (a task that is clearly not the museum’s alone); “collect contexts” as much as works: archives, documents, journals, the infrastructures that made art possible; and to do it in partnership with institutions—no matter their sizes—on the continent, sharing research, loans and authorship, so that knowledge does not travel in one direction only. Zeitz MOCAA, as an institution, its programs and its collection carry that responsibility. It should be a resource for the continent and the world .
You wrote to the New York Times that the museum “is and must continue to be a public institution,” and called Cape Town “a city of contradictions.” Which contradictions do you mean? How do you plan to explore them?
Cape Town is not merely a location; it is an argument, and its contradictions—historical, spatial and political—are themselves a curatorial invitation. Cape Town is a city in which social change has always been written into urban space. The contradictions I mean are those between a city of extraordinary openness and creativity and a city whose geography still tells you who belongs where; between the promise of the public and its fine print. Years ago, while writing with Gabi Ngcobo about Gugulective, we borrowed a phrase that I believe captures the city well: “everyone is welcome, terms and conditions may apply.”
I have been thinking about Cape Town for a long time, and what has always moved me is how its artists and communities have answered those contradictions: the District Six Museum, built from the memories of those who were removed from the city center; the tradition of the cultural workers during the Resistance Art movement; a collective like Gugulective, working from a shebeen in Gugulethu; the implementation of Chimurenga Library and programs in various moments of its trajectory; and the transformation of the artistic context, the proliferation of galleries, auction houses, cultural foundations and scholarly programs to deepen the knowledge of professionals in the field. In my research, the most enduring cultural interventions were never those that announced themselves as monuments; they worked subtly within the fabric of everyday life. Collectivity, in that sense, is not an outcome of cultural work. It is its method.
That is what I mean by a public institution. A museum is public not because of who funds it, but because it assumes responsibility for the program and the institutional space it generates, and for the communities it serves. How an institution is structured is already a curatorial statement, and a public museum must build a vision robust enough to attract the support it deserves. Zeitz MOCAA is a not-for-profit initiative that seeks to be, above all, a public, Pan-Africanist and intergenerational space. That means taking the museum beyond the Waterfront, into the city, but also making sure that communities who do not yet feel addressed by the museum come to feel it as their own, sharing not only the right to change it but also the responsibility for doing so. A museum transforms collectively, from within and from without. The question is not only who visits the museum, but who is able to inhabit it.
Next year marks the 10th anniversary of Zeitz MOCAA. Have you thought about how the institution should mark the event?
An anniversary is a good moment for an institution to ask itself questions in public. Nine years ago, Zeitz MOCAA opened with an enormous promise. Since then it has lived through a crisis, a profound transformation under Koyo, a pandemic and her loss.
It is still early days—I haven’t had time to talk to the team on the ground as much. However, I keep returning to the idea of belonging, to who the museum belongs to. I think of the museum as an open work, in Umberto Eco ’s sense: something evolving and unfinished, which its publics are invited to complete. So I imagine expanding the museum’s own archive to artists, scholars and its publics, and inviting the communities of Cape Town to tell us what the next 10 years should be, in the spirit of a Casa de la Palabra [a house of words], a place where a community gathers in processes of decision-making. I am also interested in convening institutions across the continent, independent spaces, biennials and museums, to think together about how we build and sustain cultural infrastructure, around a question Zeitz MOCAA is singularly placed to ask: what does the continent need from its cultural institutions, and what must those institutions dare to become?
In 2006, at the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, you co-curated a show of 14 emerging South African artists. What has changed most in South Africa’s art scene since that time?
“Olvida quién soy / Erase Me From Who I Am,” which I curated 20 years ago together with Gabi Ngcobo, Tracy Murinik and Khwezi Gule , brought together artists who were then at the beginning of their careers, Nicholas Hlobo , Zanele Muholi , Moshekwa Langa and Tracey Rose among them, and who have since become central to the history of contemporary art. That trajectory is in itself the clearest sign of change: South African artists are no longer guests in the international conversation; they shape it. And so do my co-curators, particularly Gabi Ngcobo, whose work has transformed the field from within.
The infrastructure has changed too: art fairs, galleries, foundations and a museum like this one. But growth brings its own questions. Much of that infrastructure is private and market-driven. At the same time, public institutions have weakened, and many young artists still work without studios, without critical platforms, without the possibility of making a living from their work. What hasn’t changed is the vitality of collectivity: artists organizing themselves and creating their own platforms when institutions fail them. I have spent much of my life learning from those experiences, and from artists who showed me that real transformation begins only when we recognize ourselves as part of something larger. A museum’s responsibility is to learn from them too.