KABELO MALATSIE

Punya Otswe Buladu is an ongoing curatorial research project that includes artworks, plants, text and music to instigate a break with inherited empirical logical system.

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Decoding the world we inhabit

CURATOR KABELO MALATSIE (MA 2018) HAS BEEN SELECTED AS THE NEW DIRECTOR OF THE KUNSTHALLE BERN IN SWITZERLAND, AN ART INSTITUTION RENOWNED FOR ITS EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH. SHE WILL BE LEAVING HER HOME IN CAPE TOWN FOR THE SWISS CAPITAL OF BERN TO BEGIN HER SEVEN-YEAR TERM IN APRIL 2022.

BY HEATHER DUGMORE

One of 130 applicants, she was selected for her professional experience and knowledge of the international art scene, and her manner of working in close collaboration with artists.

“I think that inspiration works both ways and so much of my work requires slow deliberations with artists,” Kabelo explains.

“I speak a lot with a wide range of artists, sometimes over several years, and during this time a cross-pollination occurs. Something shifts in the artists and the same happens with me. When you work on a public project it is testament to the long, often sporadic conversations that have happened between you and the artist.”

Florian Dombois, chair of Kunsthalle Bern’s hiring committee, says Kabelo understands the role of the institution “as an instigator and supporter for the redesign and reinterpretation of the world we inhabit.” She will be the first person from outside Europe to lead Kunsthalle Bern, succeeding Valérie Knoll, its first woman director.

Kabelo did research for her master’s degree in the facility’s archive. “It’s a very exciting space to work in, as it offers me the opportunity to experiment even more with exhibitions, and to have the infrastructure that supports it,” she says.

As a curator, Kabelo brings together the artistry of the everyday and inspiration from realms beyond. She prompts a re-reading of the environments we inhabit, urban and rural to reveal the artistry of life in plain sight but that is often out of sight.

Growing up in Limpopo, she saw how art was part of life, she says: it was how people made sense of the world, it was part of the everyday. But when she came to study, she found that academics distinguished between everyday art and what is considered fine art.

She offers the example of the Tuscan village of Chiusure, where she was meant to do a year’s residency in 2020/21. It’s a very small village where monks make wine and people have vegetable gardens, seek out truffles and cook wonderful meals. “I wanted to consider these moments of domesticated artistry as part of how people make sense of and be in the world.”

She is also interested in “autodidacts where worlds or disciplines collide, such as spirituality and technological innovations”. An example is a Zimbabwean, Sangulani Maxwell Chikumbutso, who without formal engineering training is said to have received visions from God enabling him to design inventions, including a free energy device, helicopter, electric car and drone.

She says the lives of people called “artists” or “creatives” are rich with various motivations. Referring to the writer Bessie Head’s words that “I am at home in a situation where there is nothing and I force something to happen”, Kabelo says: “I didn’t decide to be a curator, I just knew I wanted to work in the art world but not as an artist. I don’t have the talent, and I don’t have hang ups about this. The path to becoming a curator was a process of emergence. It started around 2008 when I met Khwezi Gule, who was a young curator at the Johannesburg Art Gallery at the time (he is now its chief curator). He said I should hang around the gallery and see what he does. I learnt a lot from him, and that’s how I knew this was for me.”

Her commitment earned her an associate directorship from 2011 to 2016 at South Africa’s Stevenson Gallery.

While working in the commercial gallery environment she realised how many artists there are who would never have the opportunity to exhibit in these spaces. “What happens to them?”

This inspired her master’s degree on the history of independent art institutions in South Africa and alternative funding and institutional models within the country. “We need decentralised models that give artists who are not in Johannesburg or Cape Town access to far more funding and grants but also facilities, infrastructure and networks between the artists so that they sustain their practices.”

To contribute to this, after completing her master’s she became the director of Visual Art Network of South Africa, a development agency including 6 000 artists and organisations focused on contemporary art and alternative exhibition models.

In 2018 she was also part of an exhibition, In the Open or in Stealth, at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona, working with a group of New Delhi-based artists called Raqs Media Collective. The exhibition explored “the concept of a future in which multiple histories and geographies are placed in dialogue”.

“It was an explorative research project that tries to break away from empirical logic. You cannot do a systematic reading of it – there is no logical relationship between the parts as I was trying to get my mind outside of binary thinking.” The parts included Japanese animation, music by cellist and musicologist Thokozani Mhlambi and vocalist NoBuntu Mqulwana-Mhlambi, and the artwork of Tito Zungu.

As an independent curator, she worked with curator and archivist Michelle Wong and artist Lantian Xie on “Deliberation on Discursive Justice” for the Yokohama Triennale 2020. “We included a story about a heron fishing in a pond. In the water it makes an umbrella with its wings to lure fish into the shade and that’s when it attacks,” Kabelo says. “We used it to explore the protocols that define ’the victim’ and ‘the perpetrator’ and how justice is not only a point in relation to persecution but includes the entire social system and its ability to recognise and hear all voices.”

Kabelo’s voice will soon be added to all those at Kunsthalle Bern. Asked how she feels about relocating, she is characteristically enigmatic: “I guess it’s Europe…” she says, and laughs.