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The African Studies Workshop at Harvard continues this semester with a new and exciting schedule of presenters. The presenters' papers explore Africa’s changing place in the world - and the new economies, legalities, socialities, and cultural forms that have arisen there. This week, Khanyisile Mbongwa will present: 'There is No Table for my Seat'.
Khanyisile Mbongwa is the Curator for the 25th Liverpool Biennial. She was previously the Chief Curator of the Stellenbosch Triennale 2020. She is a Cape Town-based independent curator, award-winning artist, and sociologist. She works with public space, interdisciplinary, and performative practices, unpacking the socio-political, socio-economic, socio-racial, gender-queer, and historical-contemporary complexities and nuances of the everyday. Khanyisile Mbongwa is a multi-disciplinary intellectual from Cape Town, South Africa. Her artistic and curatorial practices gained attention in the mid-2000s when she was part of the famous artist collective known as Gugulective. In 2018, Mbongwa completed a master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Arts, Public Art, and Public Sphere at the Institute for Creative Arts, University of Cape Town (UCT). In 2019, she was appointed the Chief Curator and Artistic Director of the first Stellenbosch Triennale currently showing in public spaces in the famous wine lands of Stellenbosch in South Africa. Prior, she was the Adjunct Curator for performative practices at Norval Foundation, based in Cape Town. In 2018 she took up a curatorial research residency at CAT (Community Art Team), Cologne, Germany focusing on the public sphere, interventions, and public policies. As a result, she curated BLUEPRINT: When There is Nowhere to Go, Where is Home? Currently she works
with the Norval Foundation as Adjunct Curator for Performative Practices and with Cape Town Carnival as Curatorial and Socio-Critical Development Advisor.
Discussant: Sarah Clunis is the Director of Academic Partnerships and Curator of African Collections at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.