Meet Gabi Ngcobo, one of the most powerful curators in the world right now

It’s no understatement to say that the European art world raised its collective eyebrows when the list of artists was announced for the 10th anniversary edition of the Berlin Biennale, an exhibition of zeitgeist in which the works are not for sale but only for display.

“An exciting list of largely unknown artists,” they declared.

“Unknown to who?” responded the South Africa-born curator Gabi Ngcobo (44). “Unknown to you maybe? Because where they come from they are known. And they are known to themselves.”

She and her all-black curatorial team of Nomaduma Rosa Masilela, Serubiri Moses, Thiago de Paula Souza and Yvette Mutumba refuse to label their approach as “Afrocentric”, “Global South” or even “post-colonial” so as to avoid easy solutions.

They have declared their refusal to be the ones responsible for sorting out the Western art world’s white patriarchal mess. Scruffy and deeply human, Ngcobo’s show is a complex and fluid tangle of histories, some erased, others still emerging, to find a new language to discuss the crises of our times and to dream erased voices back into being.

It’s titled We don’t need another hero, after the 1980s Tina Turner hit and it sets the tone. The Western heroes who conquered foreign lands have stuffed their archives with plundered cultures, leading to a great malaise. Entering the various exhibition spaces you are often met with collapsed pillars and crumbling facades. Ngcobo and her team have stormed the gates, helping to bring down the staid art institutions. In their place they have endeavoured to rebuild a new space in the ruins, with mostly artists from the global south and three-quarters of them women.

It’s an extension of Ngcobo’s life work, which is rooted in collaboration. Before Berlin she co-curated the important Sao Paulo Biennale and co-founded 3rd Eye Vision, The Centre for Historical Reenactment and Nothing Gets Done to put forward experimental collective thinking in spaces untainted by the gallery system.

It’s tempting to call her an art superstar, even though it goes against the grain of what she believes art should and could be. Still, no South African curator has ever scaled her heights. Over Skype from Berlin she talks slowly and deliberately, given to bursts of laughter and long pauses while excavating the particular phrase she is looking for.

You’ve been living far away from home, in Berlin, since April last year and I know that’s hard for you, but how’s the show going?
Generally, the response has been great and a lot of people from different backgrounds feel as if they are invited, they feel welcome, that the exhibition has something for them, so this has been heart-warming.

Has there been resistance from the system?
Well, I think there is always a resistance but I wouldn’t say it has come directly to me. There have been many reviews written and I’ve tried not to read them. I think the resistance is more towards us wanting to define ourselves. There were a lot of people thinking they knew exactly what the exhibition would be because I come from a particular background. When I appointed my curatorial team there was a kind of pointing out that there’s not a white face among them. Which is baffling to me because in previous biennales there have been only white faces.

The first all-black curatorial team for the Berlin Biennale are (from left) Thiago de Paula Souza, Gabi Ngcobo (head curator), Nomaduma Rosa Masilela and Yvette Mutumba, and Serubiri Moses 
Picture: F Anthea Schaap

You chose to use the €3 million [R46.7 million] budget to commission a lot of new work for the show?
That kind of made sense. We created a space for conversations to take place and to make sure we help the artists with as many resources as possible. Actually, the budget of the Berlin Biennale is very limited so there was a lot of fundraising to dream together with the artists.

It’s wonderful that in a sense – and with considerable irony – you and your all-black team are now the gatekeepers, dismantling while you’re claiming. How do you act now that you’ve claimed the castle?
[Laughs.] I have a lot of things to reflect on. I don’t like to think of myself as a gatekeeper but I do understand where you’re coming from. In a way there is a certain kind of power and I have to reckon with that and also think about how I am going to occupy the space in a way that doesn’t become toxic. Even the title We don’t need another hero is meant to be self-reflective; to think about how to not turn into a monster in this space, which happens to a lot of people.

But this power, which is anyway a soft power because of the intersectional issues at play, is also a chance to open the gates?
Yes it is. Many people have been locked out of these gates. But also not to centralise the idea of Europe. To be seen as only a black team means Europe is still making itself the centre. It’s important, for me at least, not to think of [Europe] as the centre of power. My context, which is South Africa and Johannesburg, is my centre. And when I start to think, I think from that centre. And so it’s about opening the gates so that people might also be allowed to think from the centre of wherever they come from. Because there are knowledge systems that have been repressed for such a long time.

If one had to simplify, the traditional African systems of knowledge that storytelling carries are more communal?
Absolutely and there is also a lot of work that needs to be done so that we can remember what those African objects are, for example, that are locked in. European museums. What knowledge do they have?

You’ll find an African mask that a young man undergoing initiation will wear to disguise himself as a woman to trick the spirits to be able to go and visit his mother in the village. When you find it dislocated in a European museum, it’s really a symbol of the entire project you have to deal with, retrieve it from the archive, breathe new meaning ... To remediate it, so to speak. I like this term when speaking about these objects. For example, Thierry Oussou has a work on the biennale that is really quite fictional in a beautiful way, because he recarved a traditional Beninese throne that resides in a museum in Paris ... This fiction interrupts the present in Benin first. When you bring it into the context of Berlin it starts to speak to debates around the restitution of objects. But we didn’t want to go there directly.

Thierry Oussou from Benin created Impossible Is Nothing, 2016–18, at the Akademie der Künste for the biennale. The artist, also an educator, reflects on remnants of African culture displayed in European museums
Picture: Timo Ohler

Can you describe what it’s like to walk into the exhibition spaces?
There are four active venues. We considered the space, the site specificity, in defining how we begin. At Kunstwerke, we begin with the work of Cinthia Marcelle called Legendaries. It is a portrait of the institution and of the Berlin Biennale because they coexisted for such a long time. And what Cinthia does is to gather a lot of people to brainstorm who are the legendaries of this institution, also administrators, behind the scenes people, not just the superstars. There are 14 figures. It’s a 10th anniversary edition so we thought of how best to mark this moment. The X of the 10 as a kind of a crossroad where the institution can see its past and its future. We emphasised how people enter each space and then choreographed the exhibition so that it’s not a coherent narrative necessarily.

So it’s putting people at the centre while the institution is at a crossroads?
Berlin is known as an international city, which is not always reflected in the institution itself. At Akademie der Kunst, another venue, we start with another silent past, which is the Haitian Revolution. [A successful anti-slavery and anti-colonial insurrection by self-liberated slaves against French colonial rule in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti.] As it was happening it was an unthinkable event. It was missing a lot of the time in the texts of the European philosophers. Akademie der Kunst is one of the oldest in Europe, it already existed at the time that the revolution was taking place. The work of Firelei Báez starts outside, a kind of a ruin ...

There’s quite a lot written about Dineo Seshee Bopape and her installation that features dripping ceilings, a film about the rape of a black woman by a white man, a video of Nina Simone having a breakdown on stage ...
She occupies the basement, the largest space of KW. And you kind of encounter this mess, an installation that has debris and fallen columns and it’s all bathed in orange light ...

If you have three-quarters of the artists on show being women, this burden of history, the strain on black women that is being foregrounded, surely that speaks throughout all the venues?
Yes I believe that it does speak throughout the venues. The inclusion of Gabisile Nkosi [the 34-year-old South African artist and print-maker murdered by her ex-boyfriend] is part of this.

Gabisile Nkosi’s work is a letter to her sister. The artist was
murdered by her ex-boyfriend in 2008

You’ve foregrounded women’s experiences in the narrative, what about queers? I know Brazilian queer artist Jota Mombaça was a big success at the public programme, exploring their own body as a site of post-colonial friction.
I work within the queer space; this is how I think and I would like the people I work with to be working within this space.

Writer and performer Jota Mombaça from Brazil was part of the
biennale’s public lecture I’m Not Who You Think I’m Not
Picture: F. Anthea Schaap

I know you don’t want to centre yourself, but there’s very little biographical information available about you. What’s your story, Gabi?
[Nervous laugh.] I try not to talk about my biography too much. But of course I exist because of my biography. I grew up in Umlazi, south of Durban. Art was something that was not usual at the time in a township school, but the school I was in introduced art as a subject when I was in Grade 10, so I sort of gravitated towards that and, of course, my ideas of what I wanna do when I finish school changed at that point. And this is a normal story, that parents worry about how this thing works because there was no information, there were no black artists, like I never knew one. Success is also not something that happened overnight. For a long time I was in the streets trying to make things happen.

You were born in 1974 and grew up in the Eighties, a time of political turbulence especially in KZN.
I remember the political upheaval very clearly because it was happening where I was growing up. I went to study at the University of Durban-Westville and there were a lot of protests that were happening in universities and especially there.

What art were they teaching?
Art history is always Eurocentric, but I think because Durban was a historically Indian university we learnt a lot about Asian visual histories from the Indian perspective, so I started to understand other philosophies ... I didn’t necessarily appreciate it at the time. I gravitated towards painting. But you know, I started playing soccer during that time and I can’t think of my university years without thinking about soccer. I played for the university team, I was playing defender, and I was captain for most of the time. I would go to the studio at night and leave in the morning so I didn’t have to see the lecturers, but at the same time I got an A, I dunno, maybe I was not teachable.

Do you still play?
No, I just watch now.

Something like the World Cup offers up so many conversations we should be having, it brings the world into one place and foregrounds inequality and immigration particularly.
Yes, absolutely and I enjoy the World Cup. I watch soccer now every four years, I have to take the month off, so to speak.

What happened next?
When I left varsity I was restless and I realised I was not equipped, you know, my education didn’t equip me to be an artist who lives in a particular environment who comes from a certain background. And so I embarked on a kind of self-directed education, but also uneducating myself, which I’m still doing, trying to get rid of certain ways of doing things. From Durban already I had a space, which was my house, basically, where I co-founded with a group of other people, 3rd Eye Vision. It begins to pick up there, seeing the power of working collaboratively and how far, not fast, you can go. And the decade of democracy that was happening in 2004, I was looking at these exhibitions that were commemorating this time and there was something very disturbing about how artists and creators were packaging South African contemporary art. My work was born out of finding the language to free ourselves from this packaging, to find other ways of thinking about memory and history and experimenting with different kinds of forms and also making sure we look at ourselves in relation to other people and places in the world, because we were part of the post-colonial condition that had happened in other places ... At Bard I could reflect on what I was doing and I could also collaborate with people I would not have had an opportunity to, from Venezuela or Mexico ...

Picture: Masimab Sasa

This thing that is a thread through all of your career, of collaboration, where does it come from?
I don’t know, maybe I need to sit quietly with the help of a psychoanalyst to figure it out. [Giggles.] Of course I grew up in a particular home that was small, so everything was shared by everyone.

It’s been announced that you are on the finding committee of the hugely important documenta exhibition that is held only every five years. What does that mean? Are we going to continue dismantling documenta as well?
Well I certainly hope so. The job is to find the next curator. It becomes critical to think about what position should occupy that space at this time.

Where to from here? Do you find time for your own personal work?
I’m always creating. You’ll see in my bio that I am an artist, but I’m not an artist that is in the studio creating work. I like to keep that identity because it allows me to work in a particular way and it’s also my degree that I earned in a time when it was almost unthinkable. If I talk about my biography, I was the first family member to go to university and so I kind of keep the fact that I’m an artist because I work as an artist curatorially. What I want to focus on, of course, is the role that nongovernmental organisations can play in the landscape of Johannesburg and South Africa. And go back to teaching as well.

Why is art important? 
I do think art is a powerful tool for us to be able to speak about our humanity and also to find a way to shape the kind of future that we want to inhabit.

• If you find yourself in Europe, We Don’t Need Another Hero is showing until September 9. To see the work online, visit