PAST PROGRAM

Curatorial Intensive In Cape Town

November 14-20, 2019

This past Fall, ICI presented the Curatorial Intensive in Cape Town in partnership with Institute for Creative Arts, at University of Cape Town. This was the sixth program on the continent, and second in South Africa, since 2013. The program coincided with Infecting the City, the longest running public arts festival in South Africa, through which we considered modes of positioning art practice within public spaces and the fabric of the city, as well as models of audience engagement that encourage collective remembrance.

12 emerging curators from Botswana, Colombia, Italy, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, and the United States attended seminars, site visits, individual meetings, and roundtable discussions that were led by: Raphael Chikukwa (Chief Curator, National Gallery of Zimbabwe), Kate Fowle (Director, MoMA PS1), Nkule Mabaso (Curator, Michaelis Galleries at the University of Cape Town), Jay Pather (Associate Professor, University of Cape Town & Director of the Institute for Creative Arts), Renaud Proch (Executive Director, ICI), Storm Janse van Rensburg (Senior Curator, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa), Tracey Rose (Artist, Johannesburg), and Jochen Volz (General Director Pinacoteca de São Paulo).

The Curatorial Intensive is made possible in part by grants from the Hartfield Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and by generous contributions from ICI’s Leadership Council, the ICI Board of Trustees, and the supporters of ICI’s Access Fund.

For more information on the Curatorial Intensive, visit ICI’s website, curatorsintl.org, or contact Monica Terrero at monica@curatorsintl.org

Tandazani Dhlakama (Curatorial Intensive Dakar ’16), currently Assistant Curator, Zeitz MOCAA, speaking to the Curatorial Intensive participants in Cape Town, November 2019.

Reflections from Martha Kazungu

On the fourth day of the Curatorial Intensive in Cape Town, the South African artist Tracey Rose set it before me plainly: she burst my bubble with a sensational thought: there are no rules in the creative world. I had traveled to the southern tip of the African continent, in the final lap of my graduate studies in Germany. It was my first trip to South Africa, and the Curatorial Intensive was both an immersive and refreshing encounter. For some of my colleagues and I, the first day was intense. Perhaps because of the unfamiliarity, it was difficult to communicate effortlessly, and also laboring under the desire to imprint a favorable first impression. But this spell vanished after a couple of days. All participants were undertaking captivating projects, through various approaches, but some had common grounds. For instance, many of us addressed commemoration and remembering through our curatorial practice. Twin Mosia’s project deals with remembering the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) and bringing to life the hard experiences of the war from black perspectives. Innocent Ekejuba’s project titled 15X15X15 seeks to uncover the Biafran War in 15 different ways in 15 locations, to address a sense of forgetting, and that history could be at the verge of repeating itself fifty years after the end of the war. My project, which celebrated 50 years of Makerere Art Gallery, at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, was also an act of commemoration.

In addition to the program’s daily presentations by the faculty, we explored art spaces around Cape Town. At A4 Arts Foundation, I had the magical first encounter with an original Malick Sidibe. At the prestigious Zeitz MOCAA, I savored some of the ongoing exhibitions, as well as Acts at Crossroads, a solo presentation of the work of Otobong Nkanga curated by Koyo Kouoh, both of whom I was delighted to meet for the first time. Furthermore, I was happy to see some of the programs of the Infecting the City festival, conceived by Jay Pather, which gave us a chance to discover innovative approaches to public art and site-specific art across the city of Cape Town. There are many lessons that I took with me from the Curatorial Intensive, which I will forever cherish. Of all these lessons is the significance of tactics, of a systematic approach towards project execution in which I divide operations into smaller and realistic tasks. I might have taken a lifetime to figure this solution. I will also remember Raphael Chikukwa’s presentation on how it took him a decade to make a Zimbabwe Pavilion a reality at the Venice Biennale. Ten years is a long time, to imagine that one can gather the patience, yet this was possible because of the small and systematic steps that were done during this time, all focused on a singular goal.

While breaking the rules, it is possible to take one step at a time, to break a large exhibition idea like mine up into smaller projects without feeling like something is missing.

Martha Kazungu is a Ugandan writer and curator. She has worked with Makerere Art Gallery, 32 Degrees East, the Ugandan Arts Trust, and Goethe Zentrum Kampala, and served as curatorial assistant for the 2016 Kampala Art Biennale. She is currently completing her Master’s degree in African Verbal and Visual Art with a focus on media and curating in Africa at the University of Bayreuth, Germany.