Catalysing Figures Capable of Inventing and Activating New Visions of a Reality

SPEAKERS

KHANYISILE MBONGWA
Curator in Chief of the Biennial of Liverpool 2023

Khanyisile Mbongwa
 is a Cape Town based independent curator, award winning artist and sociologist who engages with her curatorial practice as Curing & Care. Thus using the creative to instigate spaces for emancipatory practices, joy and play.
Mbongwa is the curator of Puncture Points, founding member and curator of Twenty Journey and former Executive Director of Handspring Trust Puppets. She’s one of the founding members of arts collective Gugulective, Vasiki Creative Citizens and WOC poetry collective Rioters In Session. Mbongwa was a Mellon Foundation Fellow at the Institute of Creative Arts at UCT, where she completed her masters in Interdisciplinary Arts, Public Art and Public Sphere. She has worked locally and internationally.
Formerly Chief Curator of the 2020 Stellenbosch Triennale. She is also currently a PhD candidate at University of Cape Town where her work focuses on spatiality, radical black self love and imagination, and black futurity.

VALENTINE UMANSKY
International Curator, Tate London

Valentine Umansky has worked for various institutions dedicated to visual arts and is currently a Curator, International Art at Tate Modern. Between 2015 and 2020, she held positions in the U.S. at the International Center of Photography, the Museum of Modern Art and the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. In France, she has collaborated with the Rencontres d’Arles festival, and published “Duane Michals, Storyteller” (Filigranes). She also co-curated the 2018 LagosPhoto Festival, and “Layers. Nigerian Modern Art” with Iheanyi Onwuegbucha.

FOLAKUNLE OSHUN
Founder and Director of the Lagos Biennial

Folakunle Oshun is an artist and curator from Lagos, Nigeria. He is the founder and director of the Lagos Biennial, a platform for critical dialogue and the development of contemporary art which will open in 2023 a speculative space for fabrication of alternate realities. He is currently a doctoral candidate at École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy, where he also lectures.

MICHÈLE SANDOZ
Head of Art Initiatives at the International Committee of the Red Cross

Michèle Sandoz joined the Foundation for the International Committee of the Red Cross FICRC to head their newly launched Art Initiative. Over the past two decades she worked in different capacities on international commercial and non-commercial art projects. Most recently, she held the role as Global Head of VIP Relations for almost 9 years at Art Basel where she led Art Basel global VIP strategy. Presently, she sits on the Advisory Board of the Executive Master in Art Market Studies EMAMS at the University of Zurich, she is also a member of the Zeitz MOCAA Global Council, and member of the Advisory Board of the Lagos Biennale. In addition, she co-chairs the Friends of the Swiss Institute New York.

Moderated by : MOHAMED AMER MEZIANE
Philosopher, performer and professor at Brown University, USA. He has been teaching for 4 years at Columbia University and serves as a board member of Multitudes. His first book, “Des empires sous la terre” (La Découverte, 2021) examines how disenchantment engenders climate change through the colonization of subterranean worlds since the 19th century.