Tawanda Appiah is an independent curator, writer, researcher and editor from Zimbabwe. Based in Malmö, Sweden, he has been appointed as a new curator at the Malamö art hub.
The curatorial position at Skånes konstförening is a two to three-year contract. Appiah will be Skånes konstförening’s curator from 2023 to 2025. He took over from C. Grace Chang, who was in the position from 2020 to 2022.
Before Malamö art hub, he was the Curator of Education & Public Programming at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. Appiah occupies on various boards including Paletten Art Journal and he is known for his research-centered practice which often revisits history to understand the contemporary scene.
Tawanda Appiah says:
“I am so honored to return to Skånes konstförening, the place that has in so many ways rooted me in Malmö. I am excited to create a dynamic and engaging programme that fosters collaboration and serves as a platform for artists and art practitioners to work and experiment. I believe that art has the power to rouse curiosity, interrogate, and reveal complexities, and I hope to actively support these processes. I am looking forward to opening doors to the audience and adding to the vibrant city of Malmö.”
In 2018, Simona Dumitriu, a former curator at the Skånes konstförening, invited Appiah for a collaboration where they invited art practitioners working in the Västra Götaland region to react and send in their proposals to the following questions:
“What are some of the deepest histories seeded in personal or public archives and records, in Västra Götaland’s ports, towns, villages and coastal areas? What are some of the borders that restrict today’s context in the region? What are the disruptions going on? How do art practitioners in the region take the power to make the discomfort or the pain visible, to project this discomfort into art and engagement, to interrogate the web of politeness? From isolation, exclusion, disconnection, dissociation, partitioning, what do you see as places of arrival?”
The collaboration birthed interactive and discursive sessions across the city.
Appiah has curated a number of exhibitions, programmes, and interventions, including the GIBCA Extended exhibition, Comforting the Machine (2021). Appiah’s upcoming show, Flight (2023), will feature works from Kudzanai Chiurai, Frida Orupabo, and Eric Magassa at Malmö Konsthall. Other projects that he has curated includes: No Country Like (Skånes konstförening, 2018); Better Safe and Sorry (Moderna Museet, 2018); On Practices (Malmö Konsthall and Skånes konstförening, 2019); To Where Are We Wonderfully Going? (2020); in(visible) (Malmö Konstmuseum, 2021), and Sonic Insurrections (2022).
His first curated exhibition at the art hub will open in September 2023.
As curator, he will work on deepening and expanding his multifaceted curatorial practice of criticality and care.
