Gabi Ngcobo
Curator
Despite her soft-spoken manner, Gabi Ngcobo’s curatorial and artistic practice is guided by a fierce yet considered sense of activism. This is why her recent appointment as the curator of next year’s 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art should come as no surprise to those who know her.
Having worked in institutions and environments steeped in apparently immovable colonialism and having witnessed the backlash that resistance to this status quo can engender, over time Ngcobo has cultivated an approach that seeks to break through the existing constraints of South African art practice.
Her singular sense of lyricism and ability to tap into and harness the zeitgeist has been apparent since her first solo and collaborative shows as an artist.
In Homecoming, her first solo show more than a decade ago, Ngcobo wove a cohesive language (using her own and her family members’ hair) to explore ideas about familial ties and wider interconnectedness.
In a pivotal group show she was involved in at that time, Ngcobo inspired 3rd Eye Vision, a collective of black artists in Durban, into a sustained state of hyperawareness and a reckoning with ancestry that culminated in the seminal Thwasa group show.
Outside the confines of the white cube, she has always examined the effect of language and the privilege of naming on the psyche of the colonised, which resulted in public debates about the etymology of Durban’s supposedly isiZulu name, iTheku. Ngcobo and her colleagues argued that it was actually called iThweke (isiZulu for a bull’s testicle).
As a curator, Ngcobo remains focused on how art practice can be made more reflective of life as it is lived by people rather than how it is theorised by a few.
“In terms of what the idea of curating can be, she presents us with some of the most imaginative and radical proposals,” says Rangoato Hlasane, Ngcobo’s colleague at the University of the Witwatersrand’s school of arts, where she maintains a teaching post.
“Her platforms have posed important questions about institutions of knowledge production and what they can look like. Her approach is about constant re-evaluation and she is always finding a new language of what we can create, to quote one of her exhibitions, ‘without panic’.
“In her work there is an awareness that we work within disciplines that have histories — but we are here in the now.”
Having cofounded the Johannesburg-based contemporary collaborative space Nothing Gets Organised with artists Dineo Seshee Bopape and curator Sinethemba Twalo, Ngcobo is proud of how it has become an open space for a new generation of South African artists.
The initiative follows other projects Ngcobo has spearheaded, such as the Centre for Historical Re-enactment.
About her upcoming role as Berlin Biennale curator, Ngcobo says: “I’m curious as to what I can effect, being someone who is interested in how institutions work. It is still early to speak about the structure [of the team I want to assemble], but I am interested in collaboration and having conversation partners.”