Speakers and provocateurs at SESSIONS eKAPA 2005 were drawn from South Africa, the continent, and further afield; and included academics, practitioners from various disciplines, activists and thinkers from diverse networks and forums.
Fernando Alvim + Cardoso Albano
Born in Angola, artist , gallerist, publisher Fernando Alvim lives between Brussels and Luanda. His work has been exhibited in single and group shows across the globe since 1995. Besides creating his own artworks, films and installations, Alvim is an active curator whose work includes the multimedia intervention Memorias Intimas Marcas (1994 –2000), an art project on the exorcism of the Angolan/South African War. In 1999, Alvim founded Camouflage, the Brussels-based European satellite of the Centre of Contemporary Art of Africa before going on to establish TACCA (Territórios de Arte e Cultura Contemporânea Africana) in 2003. Alvim is the artistic director for the first Trienal de Luanda set to be staged in Luanda, Angola in 2005/06.
Rory Bester
Rory Bester is a curator and independent scholar based in Johannesburg. He studied art history, political philosophy and religious studies at the University of Cape Town, and received his MA in Art History from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He has curated a number of multimedia exhibitions, including Democracy’s Images: Photography and Visual Art from South Africa (Umeå, 1998) and Kwere Kwere / Journeys into Strangeness (Cape Town, 2000). He is an associate curator of The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945 to the Present (Munich, 2001). He teaches cultural and media studies in the Wits School of Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand.
coffeebeans routes
Established by Iain Harris, Jethro Louw and Mzwandile Matiwana, coffeebeans routes (provocateurs) is an urban regeneration agency working in the townships of Cape Town. Part record label, part artist agency representing musicians and poets and part music tourism company, they explore cultural diversity, heritage and legacy, working to unlock economic potential using strategies of sustainable development.
Donna Conwell
Donna Conwell received her MA in Art History from Edinburgh University. Associate Curator of inSite_05, she served as the editor for Latinart.com , a web-based magazine concerning art and culture in the Americas from 2002 to 2003. Assistant Curator at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City from 2001 to 2002, Conwell co-ordinated and assisted with numerous exhibitions. Conwell has also authored texts for publications that include Latinart.com, e-flux.com, Time Out , The List and Foto/Dimension . She currently lives and works in San Diego.
Ntone Edjabe
Ntone Edjabe is a Cameroonian-born journalist and DJ, radio personality, cultural activist and founding editor of Chimurenga, a Cape Town based publication that aims to “end the noise control by media monopolies in South Africa” by eschewing stereotypes and cutting to the bone of “truth-saying in the form of political analysis that takes no prisoners”. His writing, mostly on arts and cultures, has been widely published in newspapers and magazines in South Africa and abroad. He hosts Soul Makossa on Bush Radio, a progressive radio station in Cape Town, and is a member of the Fong Kong Bantu Soundsystem, a collective of DJs. During the day, he manages the Pan African Market, a trade and cultural centre in Cape Town.
Graham Falken
Graham Falken is the co-director of the Arts and Media Access Centre (AMAC), an organisation committed to promoting media and cultural diversity in South Africa. Driven by his life-long belief in the transformative power of the arts, Falken also serves on national steering committee of NACSA (Network for Arts and Culture South Africa), the Arts Committee for the Cape Town Festival and is the chair of the Western Cape Federation of Community Arts Centres. He has a rich background in counselling as a trainer and supervisor working with government, educational, commercial, NGO and health care sectors, and has also served as a lecturer.
N‘Goné Fall
Ngone Fall is a versatile Senegalese art curator, art publisher and consultant in cultural policies. As an editor with the Paris-based publisher Revue Noire, she co-edited Anthology of African Art: The 20th Century (2002), a sweeping, 400-plus-page survey of art production across the continent. Fall has also curated numerous shows in Europe and the continent. Focused on themes of African identity, her work seeks to unearth hidden biases of the contemporary art world and expose the West’s appetite for difference in global cultural relations. In her words, "We can no longer identify an African artist because there is no such thing anymore."
Kendell Geers
A self confessed “virus at the heart of the beast” and the original rebel of the South African artworld, Kendell Geers has been provoking controversy since the 80s when he launched his career by throwing a brick through a gallery window. He has subsequently worked relentlessly, participating in major group shows and biennales from Taipei to Berlin, and publishing three substantial monographs: Your Tongue in My Cheek (2001), the forest of suicide (2004) and fingered (2005). His next stop is the first Trienal de Luanda where he’ll be serving as an art consultant.
Thomas Gesthuizen
An activist, a film maker and a hip-hop DJ, Thomas Gesthuizen is best know as the founder of africanhiphop.com, an “100 percent independent, uncensored“ online community that serves the goal of “unifying everybody who's inspired by hip-hop and by the cultures of Africa and of African origins”. Initiated in 1997 as a platform for information and discussion, the site has grown into a prime source of information on African hip-hop. It features Africa’s first online hip-hop radio station and attracts over 30 000 unique visitors per month.
Thembinkosi Goniwe
Thembinkosi Goniwe is a young South African artist and scholar. As an artist Goniwe uses a variety of media and techniques to explore "unspoken racial constructs that are visible and implicit in our postcolonial and post-Apartheid era". Similarly Goniwe's theoretical work examines the effect of African tradition and culture on society today. He received an MFA from the University of Cape Town in 1999 and subsequently taught there for three years before moving overseas to take up residencies in Europe and America. His work has been exhibited in Africa, Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom. He is currently completing his PhD at Cornell University in the United States and will be taking up a position in the Wits School of Arts next year.
Khwezi Gule
Khwezi Gule is an artist, administrator and curator, and has served as a Fellow Curator of the Brett Kebble Art Awards (2004) and the curator of Contemporary Collections at JAG. He has held solo exhibitions and participated in numerous group exhibitions both locally and internationally. Gule is also a teacher and researcher often working with community-based organisations and education projects.
Gavin Jantjes
Raised in Cape Town's District Six, Gavin Jantjes attended Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town in the late 1960s after which he began to exhibit locally, using his art to speak out against the policy of apartheid. Above all his South African Colouring Book (1974/1975) was a radical stocktaking of South African reality. The regime was not long in responding: the pictures were censored and the whole of Jantjes’ work was banned in South Africa. The artist was forced to go into exile and completed his Masters in Germany in 1972. Subsequently based mostly in the UK and Norway, Jantjes has had significant experience and success as an international artist, researcher, writer, educator, and curator. Most importantly he has an impressive track record as an arts administrator at several leading European cultural institutions.
Koyo Kouoh
Cameroonian-born art administrator and curator Koyo Kouoh was Coordinator of Cultural Programs at the Gorée Institute before setting up the African Association for Contemporary Culture. A well known and highly respected cultural producer, Koyo Kouoh has worked with the Dakar Biennale of Art since 2000, co-curated the Rencontres de la Photographie Africaine (2001 & 2003) and facilitated La Caravane de la Poésie, a literature tour from Gorée to Timbuctu (1999). Specialising in photography and public interventions, she has curated exhibitions in Brazil, Switzerland, Austria and Germany and written extensively on contemporary African art. She is currently based in Dakar.
Premesh Lalu
Premesh Lalu is an historian and academic specialising in questions about reparations, development and marginality and the postcolonial theorisation of history. A lecturer at the University of the Western Cape, Lalu has published widely in journals including History and Theory, Current Writing, South African Historical Journal, Kronos and History in Africa. In 2004 he initiated the project Finding UWC, as part of an international consortium on the theme of Globalisation and the Humanities: The Problems of Cultural Sovereignty. He is also a recipient of the Rector¡s teaching award for the best lecturer at UWC (2004).
Andrew Lamprecht
Andrew teaches art theory at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. He writes about, curates and sometimes makes art. He has published extensively and participated in numerous conferences and exhibition but is most infamous for his "conceptual art interventions" that blur the borders between curatorship and art. These include 2004’s Flip, an exhibition of 17th Century Dutch Master paintings all hung the wrong way around and 2003’s Bruce Gordon, a solo show by Ed Young in which a bar owner was designated as an artwork.
Achille Mbembe
Achille Mbembe is a Senior Researcher of the Institute of Social and Economic Research of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Born in Cameroon, he studied in Paris before going on to lecture widely at institutes in both America and in Africa. An internationally acclaimed theorist, Mbembe has written extensively on African history and politics. His first book to be published in English, On The Post Colony (2001) gained significant attention for his groundbreaking interdisciplinary approach and provocative reframing of postcolonialism. Most recently Mbembe co-edited an issue of Public Culture (2004) which is currently being reworked as a book, Johannesburg: The Illusive Metropolis, set to published in 2006.
Moshekwa Langa
South African born Moshekwa Langa shot to international prominence after being invited, at a very young age, to study at the Rijksakademi voor Beeldende Kunst in Amsterdam. He has subsequently held solo exhibitions around the world and has participated in numerous group exhibitions and biennials. In 2001 he was awarded the South African FNB Vita Art Prize. An artist not afraid to draw from a life lived in-between places - physical, mental, and otherwise, Langa creates drawings, photographs, videos, and installations that are poetic, personal, and engaged with the larger world of art, politics, and popular culture. Described as a “disruptive enigma” and “a real challenge”, he often uses materials at his immediate disposal, piling up meanings and references to create cryptic yet deeply resonant works.
Mustafa Maluka
Born and currently based in Cape Town, Mustafa Maluka made an immediate impact on the local art scene when he held his first solo shows in 1997 and 1998. He subsequently moved to Amsterdam for six years and studied at De Ateliers. He exhibited extensively while overseas, and was awarded the annual Tollman prize for a young artist on his return to Cape Town in 2004. In addition to painting, Mustapha works in digital media and co-runs the pioneering website africanhiphop.com.
Thomas Mulcaire
Thomas Mulcaire co-ordinated the exhibition components of the inaugural Johannesburg Biennale in 1995 and was a member of the artistic direction of documenta X in Kassel in 1997. In 1999 he founded the Institute for Contemporary Art in Cape Town. Within the framework of the ICA Cape Town, he has produced projects with Steve McQueen, Peter Friedl, Ôngela Ferreira, and radioqualia. The most recent ICA project is Skintstream (2005). Mulcaire¡s practice often takes the form of collaborations or structural interventions and his projects include Odradek (1998), The Trial of Pol Pot (with Philippe Parreno and Liam Gillick) in 1998, Johnny (with Craigie Horsfield) in 2000 and Library of Congress (with Joseph Kpobly) in 2003. His work has been exhibited on the 1998 Sæo Paulo Bienal, Ars Electronica in Linz in 2002 and the 2004 Sydney Biennale. He is currently working with Marko Peljhan on a project called Interpolar, which will involve the establishment of research stations for artists and scientists in Antarctica and in the Arctic Circle in 2007.
Tracy Murinik
Tracy Murinik is an independent art writer and critic based in Cape Town. She has a BA in Art History and English from the University of the Witwatersrand. She worked as a coordinator for the first and second Johannesburg Biennales; was a regular correspondent in Cape Town for the Mail & Guardian newspaper for over three years, and for the online art publication, ArtThrob. She is the author of the Fresh monograph on Moshekwa Langa; contributes regularly to the quarterly contemporary art publication Art South Africa and is author of numerous essays and reviews for catalogues, magazines and journals, local and international.
Noëleen Murray
Architect, urban planner and academic Noëleen Murray works with dispossessed communities in the Cape Town, approaching questions of space in an interdisciplinary way. A lecturer at the School of Architecture & Planning at Centre for African Studies, she has also worked on a number of research projects, including the NAI Exhibition entitled: Blank Architecture Apartheid And After (1998). She is a founder member of the Cultural Sites and Resources Forum, an interdisciplinary research project, which is concerned with contributing to the critical debates surrounding cultural landscapes; and a member of the UWC Project on Public Pasts.
Marcus Neustetter
Based in Johannesburg, South Africa, Marcus Neustetter is an artist producing projects in mobile, web and low tech translations of new media, a researcher exploring new media art specifically within South Africa and a facilitator and curator developing projects that address the relationship between art and technology. As director (with Stephen Hobbs) of The Trinity Session and sanman (southern African new media art network) and The Gallery PREMISES he has been involved in creating opportunities and platforms for local digital art through projects in South Africa and Europe. These include Ars Electronica (Austria), Transmediale.03 (Germany) and E-tester (Spain).
Ruth Noack
Ruth Noack is an art historian, lecturer, independent curator and art critic. She also teaches film theory at the University of Vienna. From 2002-03 she served as the President of the Association Internationale des Critiques d'Art in Austria and from 1994 has served as an art critic for springerin, Camera Austria, and Texte zur Kunst. Noack studied art history, audio-visual media and feminist theory in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Austria. Since 1992, Noack has collaborated on several exhibitions in Europe including The Government (2003-2005), Organisational Form (2003) and Things We Don't Understand (2000). She is currently a curator on documenta 12.
Gabi Ngcobo
Gabi Ngcobo is an artist, writer and cultural activist. Her art has been exhibited locally and internationally and her writing appears regularly in local art publications. A co-founder of 3rd Eye Vision in Durban and a co-chair for the Western Cape branch Visual Arts Network South Africa, she is currently flexing her curatorial skills as Assistant Curator at the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town.
Mimi Cherono Ng'ok
Mimi Cherono Ng’ok is ais an artist, photography student and arts administrator. She has held a solo photographic exhibition of graffiti in Cape Town and participated in numerous group exhibitions in and around the city. Mimi has also worked as a photography facilitator at Arts and Media Access Centre and an exhibitions co-ordinator at the Zanzibar International Film Festival.
Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi
Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi is a writer, cultural activist and an artist based in Nigeria. He has taken part in numerous exhibitions, conferences and workshops within Nigeria and abroad. An active participant in cultural development on the continent he is a member of The Pan-African Circle of Artists, The Visual Orchestra, The Art Republic and the Congress for Cultural Action in West Africa.
Sylvester Ogbechie
Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie (Ph.D. Northwestern University) teaches classical, modern and contemporary African and African Diaspora arts at the University of California Santa Barbara. He is the Founder and Director of Aachron Knowledge Systems and Principal Curatorial Consultant for the Mbanefo Charitable Foundation, a New York based foundation that promotes knowledge of modern and contemporary African arts. He organized the First International Nollywood Convention and Symposium (Los Angeles, June 2005), which inaugurates a scholarly discourse on contemporary African Visual Culture and New Media from the perspective of the internationally acclaimed Nigerian Video Film Industry. He serves on the editorial board of Nka, African Arts and Ijele, and is a curatorial adviser to the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. His book, Ben Enwonwu: Aesthetics and the Mythic Imagination is forthcoming from the University of Rochester Press. His articles and reviews have appeared in African Arts, Arts Journal, NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Revue Noire, Ijele, Farafina, and several important art history anthologies.
Olu Oguibe
Born in Nigeria, educated in London, residing in the United States and curating and exhibiting internationally, Olu Oguibe is a central figure in the postcolonial debate. Focused on ideas of misunderstanding, place, voice, social justice and loss, his work has been shown in exhibitions in major galleries and museums around the world. He also carries on a parallel practice as a writer, poet, art historian and curator. He co-edited Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, is co-curator of Authentic/Ex-centric: Africa in and out for the 2001 Venice Biennale and most recently received extensive critical acclaim for his book The Culture Game (2003). Oguibe is co-editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art in New York and an editor on New York popular culture magazine, aRude.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor is currently Executive Director of the Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF), an arts centre that aims to promoting Dhow culture through films and other media. Born in Nairobi, Kenya she holds a BA degree in Linguistics, English and History from Jomo Kenyatta University and an MA (TV/Video Development) degree from the University of Reading in Britain. In 2003 Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor beat a field of 120 African writers to clinch the prestigious Caine Book Prize for African short story writing with Weight of Whispers.
Edgar Pieterse
Edgar Pieterse was appointed Special Policy Advisor in the Office of the Premier, Western Cape Provincial Government in November 2004. He is a co-founder of the Sustainability Institute and a co-founder and Director of the Isandla Institute, a development policy think-tank. He has worked extensively in the NGO sector in South Africa and is regularly enlisted as a consultant by government agencies, donor organisations and civil society structures. Pieterse also maintains a keen academic interest through teaching and writing. He teaches urban development at the University of Cape Town. His most recent published writing is on urban policy in South Africa, metropolitan governance and strategic planning, social formations in South Africa, poverty eradication and capacity building and development theory.
Lesego Rampolokeng
Sometimes called a city poet, Soweto-born Lesego Rampolokeng comments on in-your-face existence with a rhythmically crafted mix of subtleness and brazen bravado. Infamous for his willingness to take on anything, Rampolokeng’s subject matter spans history, politics, religion, war, economics, obscenity, consumerism, silliness, sexual hypocrisy and his own contradictions. Word bomber in the extreme, Rampolokeng has performed extensively across the world and published numerous acclaimed books of poetry, as well as novels, plays and essays.
Tracey Rose
South African-born multimedia artist Tracey Rose has, over the past five years, become an increasingly resonant energy within South African and international visual art domains. Often flamboyant and usually aggressively personal, her politically grounded, performance-based practice has caused critical and conceptual ripples in numerous international cultural gathering pools including the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale (1997), the 49th Venice Biennale and, most recently, Africa Remix (2004).
Claire Tancons
Claire Tancons is a curator and writer working between New York, Paris, Port of Spain and Pointe-à-Pitre. She is currently conducting research into the influence of Carnival on contemporary Caribbean and Latin American artistic practices. Having studied in Europe and the United States, she has held research and curatorial positions in a variety of leading American institutions. She is a frequent contributor to NKA and to Third Text and part of the production team working on a documentary featuring Édouard Glissant.
