ANA Spotlight: African Curators in Central Europe

Curating goes beyond selecting an artist’s work to display. A skilled curator knows to create a two-way experience for the artist and the audience. The audience is invited to bear witness to the artist’s work and the artist is made to discover their own work anew. There are curators actively representing artists living in Africa and African artists in the Diaspora while bridging the link between them and new audiences on a global art stage. 

Meet some of the curators influencing the art scene in different art houses in Central Europe:

Nabila Abdel Nabi

London-based art historian and curator Nabila Abdel Nabi was born in Cairo, Egypt. She is currently a curator of International Art at Tate Modern. Before then, she was the Associate Curator at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto. She has also served as Gallery Manager at The Third Line in Dubai. Nabila has worked on solo exhibitions and facilitated new commissions by artists including Abbas Akhavan, Kader Attia, Omar Ba and Amalia Pica, among others. She has curated the forthcoming Hajra Waheed exhibition Hold Everything Dear at The Power Plant, Toronto and was previously Art Editor at the literary magazine ‘The Point’. 

You can follow more of her work here.

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, born in Yaoundé, Cameroon, is a contemporary art curator and writer living in Berlin. He is the founder and art director of SAVVY Contemporary, ‘a laboratory of form-ideas’,  in Berlin. SAVVY Contemporary started to continue dialogues about the North-South cultural divide with exhibitions focused on post-colonial, anthropological, and socio-psychological studies. He has held different curatorial positions in his career including, the artistic director of Sonsbeek20–24, a quadrennial contemporary art exhibition in Arnhem, the Netherlands; the artistic director of the 13th Bamako Encounters 2022, a biennale for African photography in Mali; and the Curator at Large for Documenta 14, Kassel, Germany. Together with the Miracle Workers Collective, he curated the Finland Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019. He was a recipient of the first OCAD University International Curators Residency fellowship in Toronto in 2020 and is currently a professor in the Spatial Strategies MA program at the Weissensee Academy of Art in Berlin. His latest contribution, ‘A means to render our lives believable’, is in New Frame. From 2023 he will take on the role of Director at Haus der Kulturen der Welt(HKW) in Berlin. 

You can follow more of his work here.

Gabi Ngcobo

Gabi Ngcobo is an artist and curator based in Johannesburg and Berlin. She is currently the curatorial director at Javett UP. Since the early 2000s, Ngcobo has been engaged in collaborative artistic, curatorial, and educational projects in South Africa and on an international scope. She is a founding member of the Johannesburg-based collaborative platforms NGO – Nothing Gets Organised and Center for Historical Reenactments (CHR, 2010–14). NGO focuses on processes of self-organization that take place outside of predetermined structures, definitions, contexts, or forms. Ngcobo co-curated the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, 2016, which took place at the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion in São Paulo, BR, and A Labour of Love, 2015, at Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt am Main, DE. She has collaborated with various institutions including Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno (CAAM), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, ES; Durban Art Gallery, SA; Joburg Art Fair, Johannesburg, SA; Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC), Johannesburg, SA; LUMA/Westbau, Pool, Zurich, CH; New Museum, Museum as Hub, New York, US; and Raw Material Company, Dakar, SN, among others. She has been teaching at the Wits School of Arts, University of Witswatersrand, SA since 2011. Her writings have been published in various catalogues, books, and journals.

You can follow more of her work here.