Episode 09
Brown Atlantis feat. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung & Natasha Ginwala
Episode Date: 30 July 2021
Guest: Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung Natasha Ginwala
Listen to EpisodeIn this special two hour episode of Brown Atlantis we go underwater with pearl divers in the Persian Gulf, think about the occluded histories of Sidi communities in Gujarat, count the number of names for the monsoons, listen to calypso from Sri Lanka and see what residues are left on a ship breaking yard. As usual we listen to music, read poetry and riff on how to plot the sonic uncartography of a Brown Atlantis.
Dr. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (born in 1977 in Yaoundé, Cameroon) is an independent curator, author and biotechnologist. He is founder and artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin and is the artistic director of Sonsbeek20–24, a quadrennial contemporary art exhibition in Arnhem, the Netherlands. He is artistic director of the 13th Bamako Encounters, a biennale for African photography in Mali. Ndikung was the curator-at-large for Adam Szymczyk’s Documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany in 2017; a guest curator of the Dak’Art biennale in Dakar, Senegal in 2018; as well as artistic director of the 12th Bamako Encounters in 2019. Together with the Miracle Workers Collective, he curated the Finland Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019. He was a recipient of the first OCAD University International Curators Residency fellowship in Toronto in 2020 and is currently a professor in the Spatial Strategies MA program at the Weissensee Academy of Art in Berlin. From 2023 he will take on the role of Director at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin.
Natasha Ginwala is a curator, writer and editor based in Colombo and Berlin. Ginwala is Associate Curator at Gropius Bau, Berlin; Artistic Director of Colomboscope Festival in Sri Lanka and the 13th Gwangju Biennale with Defne Ayas. She has curated numerous exhibitions and biennales around the world over the past decade. Ginwala writes regularly on contemporary art and visual culture. Recent co-edited volumes include Stronger than Bone (Archive Books and Gwangju Biennale Foundation) and Nights of the Dispossessed: Riots Unbound (Columbia University Press).
