Listen to Episode 4 of The ICA Podcast!
Featuring an in-depth interview with curator Khanyisile Mbongwa, as well as contributions from artist and academic Nomusa Makhubu and ICA Director Jay Pather.
Khanyisile Mbongwa is a Cape Town-based independent curator who works with public space, and interdisciplinary and performative practices, unpacking the socio-political, socio-economic, socio-racial and historical-contemporary complexities and nuances of the everyday. Mbongwa recently curated the 2020 Stellenbosch Triennale.
In this wide-ranging conversation, Mbongwa reflects on her decision to transition from artist to curator and why she resists the term ‘performance’, we unpack Mbongwa’s 2017 demonstration at the ICA Live Art Festival, kuDanger! and her 2016 collaboration with Urban Village in Soweto, and we visit an alleyway in Gugulethu to talk through Mbongwa’s Masters research on irhanga (township alleyways) as a public space for black self-realisation and self-love, and a tool to critique the spatial politics that limit how townships are imagined.
Khanyisile Mbongwa, Tatyana Levana Photography
About the ICA Podcast
The ICA Podcast extends the work begun by the ICA’s 2019 publication Acts of Transgression: Contemporary Live Art in South Africa – through conversations with the creators and curators of Live Art. Read more about the vision for The ICA Podcast, and the artists featured in Season 1.
Listen and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Podcast Addict, or wherever you find podcasts. You can also listen on our website.
Khanyisile Mbongwa, public intervention in Soweto in collaboration with Urban Village, 2016.
Looking ahead
In Episode 5 (to be released slightly later, on 3 September) we’ll be speaking to performance artist and photographer Dean Hutton – join us then!