IBA Stage: 12th Liverpool Biennial – Khanyisile Mbongwa

Curator of Liverpool Biennial 2023, Khanyisile Mbongwa. Photo credit – Bongeka Ngcobo

IBA Stage: 12th Liverpool Biennial
June 28th, 2023 (Wednesday)
11am (Liverpool/GMT+1)

We are delighted to introduce Khanyisile Mbongwa, Curator of the 2023 Liverpool Biennial titled ‘uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things‘ who will be joining us in the upcoming IBA Stage event on June 28th. The curatorial framework she developed for this year’s edition of the UK’s longest running biennial centers around what the future might look like when investigated using ‘uMoya’ as a guide or compass. ‘uMoya’ is a provocation – an attempted return of that which has been lost and taken from those who have been silenced or forgotten. Liverpool is a city with a complex history, with inextricable ties to the transatlantic slave trade and an identity still very much linked to its function as a port, Mbongwa’s project considers the strong winds in Liverpool – the same winds which made Liverpool a centre in the violent trade of enslaved people – and suggests they are harnessed to blow new routes on the map and create new pathways for a reckoning to occur.

Khanyisile Mbongwa is a Cape Town-based independent curator, award-winning artist and sociologist who engages with her curatorial practice as Curing & Care, 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 is 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 the University of Cape Town, where she completed her masters in Interdisciplinary Arts, Public Art and the Public Sphere, and has worked locally and internationally. She is also currently a PhD candidate at UCT where her work focuses on spatiality, radical black self love and imagination, and black futurity.

Formerly Chief Curator of the 2020 Stellenbosch Triennale, her other recent projects include: Process as Resistance, Resilience & Regeneration – a group exhibition co-curated with Julia Haarmann honoring a decade of CAT Cologne (2020), Athi-Patra Ruga’s solo at Norval Foundation titled iiNyanka Zonyaka (The Lunar Songbook) (2020) and a group exhibition titled History’s Footnote: On Love & Freedom at Marres, House for Contemporary Culture in Maastricht, Netherlands (2021).

As always IBA Stage events are meant as a moment to hear about a project through its makers and have the opportunity to participate in a Q&A session at the end of the presentation.

Click here to register for the event or follow us through our usual social media channels.