Editor's note: The following is a transcript of a conversation between Joel Cabrita, the South African artist and curator Gabi Ngcobo, Sabelo Mlangeni, and students from Professor Cabrita's class, held at Stanford University's Cantor Arts Center on November 15, 2023.

Joel Cabrita: So some of you were at the events yesterday evening, where Gabi spoke a bit about her work as a curator. And I know there may be some follow-on questions. We'll make sure we have time for those. But I thought we could start by having a three-way conversation. I think it'd be very interesting to hear more about—as part of our exploration of what curation is—the issue of how curators are trained, I think, is quite interesting. And I believe you both overlapped for a period at your institution—I mean the place where you received your curatorial training. I'd love to actually hear more about that. And then also, we're going to hear more about how Sabelo and Gabi got to know each other, how that kind of working relationship developed over the course of a few shows. And then some broader questions about Gabi's work as a curator. Feel free to ask any questions at any point. So, how should we begin? Do you want to tell us, Gabi, about your path to curating, how that happened for you, how you came to this area?

Gabi Ngcobo: Maybe I can start by saying that the course itself of art is for curators, it's not to learn to curate. So I think many of us, we're coming from practice in any case. Let me just speak for myself to be safe. I came from practice, and I just needed to escape a little bit from my practice in order to also understand it and to have some distance and understand what I've been doing, and have an opportunity to really share my projects that I've been doing in South Africa and have them discussed by other people, to listen to other people, to form networks, to read. And to not be so seduced by my own story. The class that I was in was quite interesting, because it was the fifteen of us. It was very international. There were four Americans, I think, and then people from different places: Iran, Poland, Turkey. That was interesting, because then the discourse was really not just about me, my history, South Africa. I could read, I could listen to other positions—there were people from Mexico, from Venezuela—so that was really quite interesting for me. So I think my approach was like, I went there to read, to meet people, to network, to get out of myself. I didn't go there to become a curator, necessarily. When I finished the program, I went home, and it was very clear that I don't want to go and find a job to be a curator. I appreciated the framework and all the readings and I went from there. But it wasn't the scientific know-how of how to curate exhibitions. It was more like exhibition histories, post-colonial understanding, and a lot of reading of philosophy, and then also making exhibitions. When I was there in my year—which was the sixteenth year of the program—it was the first time that there was a collaboration between the people in the MA. Because I've always been interested in these conversations and what they do to my practice, in the thesis exhibition I collaborated with the Mexican Andrea Torreblanca, who I'm still working with, with the INSITE Project, as well as Carlos Palacios from Venezuela. They ended up falling in love and having a baby and getting married. It was very dramatic, but it's really beautiful. I kept those relationships and those connections, and I think that's why I went there. Also, it was very clear for me that when I'm done, I'm not staying in America, I'm going back home. And Casa wanted to have an international practice in the locality where I come from, immediately arriving from Bard (College). I think I spoke last night for those of you who were there: this idea of not asking for permission or declaring things. Sohrab Mohebbi from Iran and I in the program had written concept notes for a project space. And then I said, okay, I'm going to go and do this in Johannesburg. And that's how PASS-AGES, our Center for Historical Reenactments, was born, basically, in a nutshell. But I wasn't going to go to museums and try to have a badge. I wanted to own the practice and to have it as independent as possible, so as to be as experimental as possible. But Christina has her own story.

Christina Linden: I was in the class just a year prior. I started a year prior to Gabi and my class was a little less international. I would say my class was a little less fun than yours, but it was definitely all people who had had some kind of practice before. I was there for the two years of the program, and then I had a fellowship the year after, so I saw a few more classes than you did. I think that the whole time there was one student who entered straight from an undergraduate degree in art history, but that was quite unusual for them to accept somebody who didn't already have enough practical experience to be sure that they wanted to be in the field. Which is a real strength of the program: that it's a place for people who've already been working and bring perspectives that are not just theoretical. Also, I think the internationality of the program is a real strength. I had been working previously a bit in museums, but more in commercial galleries. And I was quite sure I wanted to keep working with artists—and also quite sure I've never wanted to work with another art fair. So for me, it was a slightly different background than Gabi. But it was a time to be able to step away from what can be hectic about cycles in production when you're working in the field and do some more reading and reflection and thinking about where I wanted to direct my work. And I knew at that time that I was less interested in selling things, but very interested in continuing to work with artists, with artwork directly. I ended up working as a curator for a while in a museum. And then people just kept asking me to teach, I think, starting with the fellowship. I was doing some teaching already. And so that just kept being part of my practice. And I discovered that I really liked it. So I’ve been moving back and forth between teaching and working in museums and on exhibitions for more than ten years now. I’ve met some great collaborators. I'm certainly still in touch with people. But I haven't had as much opportunity to collaborate closely with people who were in my class, as it sounds like you're still doing that.

Joel: How common is this kind of program? I mean, are there many other institutions in the United States doing this? Or is Bard kind of exceptional?

Christina: There was kind of a big uptick, Bard was one of the first ones in the United States. It was founded around 2000. And then there is a whole bunch of other ones that either followed suit or created similar experiences, including the one I was teaching at—California College of the Arts—until recently. But a large number of those have closed again.

Joel: Why?

Christina: I think a number of reasons. A lot of them were in art schools rather than universities or broader colleges. And it's been a hard time for art schools in general in this country to remain and to keep small programs funded. It's interesting, because at CCA, there were tons of students interested in doing an MFA. Tons of people say that it's because people were coming out of these programs and not finding enough jobs or not making a living. But artists don't have better prospects than that, necessarily, in terms of investing in a graduate program. There were a lot, and I started to meet a lot of people who were going into those programs without any practical experience, and actually, without even a clear sense of what the field was. And certainly I saw a lot of applications for the program at CCA that fit that bill: people who didn't have much experience working in the arts at all. I do think that it's very competitive as a field. And it doesn't necessarily serve people well to invest that much time in something before they have a sense of what the field is.

Student Question: So you mentioned a lot of international students. So is that because these programs are not offered in their countries? Programs similar like the curator education?

Gabi: In my country, this program didn't exist. But I think it's true for other countries as well. At that time, Bard was one of the few programs in the world. But since then, there have been more, in England, in Sweden, in China, even in South Africa, I can't speak for the entire continent. The programs mostly come through heritage studies, and then it becomes kind of like museum studies, kind of curatorial, curatorial concept, or exhibition histories can be discussed.

Joel: What are some of the places in South Africa that offer this?

Gabi: Wits University within art history. It's not a whole course, it's almost more like an elective. That's the only one I know, really… University of Cape Town has one, which is called something like "curating heritage."

Joel: But I suppose "heritage" in South Africa is a very well-established, well-funded area by the government.

Gabi: I don't know anything about the government [laughs].

Joel: I am curious to know—you said that you did not learn to be a curator at Bard, you came already as a curator. Can you tell us a bit about your journey as a curator prior to arriving at Bard? How did you get into it in South Africa?

Gabi: I guess it was a mistake. I mean, it was, at that point, not like a mishap or something. It's connected to the history of South Africa, of coming out of apartheid: we're now finding the art scene was extremely white, as it still mostly is, inaccessible. The artists have always been there, but the systems that govern that have always been controlled by white academia. But also, informally, even commercially. So I think, for us, when we were coming up, we were a group of people who said, "We need to group and become more visible. We need to write, we need to go to these conferences, we need to have a position." And all of a sudden we're organizing exhibitions. When I organized the first exhibition many years ago, I didn't even know the word "curator." I was just organizing because it was critical that we do so. I was organizing from a house in Durban with other local artists, and we gathered in this house, and I lived in the house, as well. We made these exhibitions, and we were a collective called Third Eye Vision. I think because we stood on each other's shoulders, we became more visible and also individually within the collective. So really, it was out of necessity.

And then I was strangely hired at the National Gallery, which is in Cape Town, South African National Gallery, when I was passing through Cape Town doing something else. There was a force of upcoming Black artists or historians who were questioning museums and questioning modes of representation. And I think when I was passing through Cape Town, those questions were quite intense. I sat in a conversation with a senior curator in a museum that I didn't know was an interview. It was a Friday, and on Monday, I was in the job. So that the institution could breathe … I was definitely a diversity hire. I had been working outside doing all this organizing with other people, and suddenly I was inside. I remember working at A-Mac, which was an informal school that prepared, especially post-high school students before university, or if they wanted to go to university, and I would go every Friday to teach them. I think I lasted about 18 months in the institution, because I was always thinking about the outside, and so I left and went back to the streets.

Joel: Tell us a bit about the National Gallery and what your work as a curator looked like.

Gabi: I was hired as an assistant curator. There was the curator of paintings and sculptures, curator of wax on paper, new media, African art, which I didn't understand because we were already in Africa. What else? A curator of education, or an education officer, really. And then I was the assistant curator. I really didn't know what I was doing because I had never worked in an institution. Yes, I'd organized things. When I arrived at the South African art gallery, the museums were trying to close the gap that was created by not collecting Black artists in an African country. So they were buying in bulk, kind of like panic buying. But also the Department of Arts and Culture, which is a government ministry, was giving money to museums to close this gap, to curate works by artists who are not white, in South Africa. So when I arrived, the day I arrived, the exhibition had opened, which basically was like new acquisitions from this funding, which was called transformation funding. It was a moment of pride, and the institution said, "Look, we are doing the work." The person who hired me, Emma Bedford, said, "Do you want to do a forum? A conversation?" Which, for me, it felt very scary to do so. But I spoke to different people, including Tim, who is actually the most vocal of my peers, in terms of transformation within the South African art scene. He was studying at Cornell, with Salah Hassan, so he would come back and cause a lot of trouble. He was loud. He called things as they were. So we saw him as brave and confrontational. I invited him to this panel and he was the last to speak. And then in the panel, he started accusing the staff of the museum of racism, of not hiring Black graduates. Actually, when I arrived at the museum, I realized that none of the people who worked there, except one person, even had university degrees. So for me, it was a shock. And of course, this was South Africa. People were hired because of the color of their skin. And they had been in the museum, they've gained experience, they had been in the museums for sometimes 26 years, up to 30 years, without these changes happening. So there was a kind of a huge moment because it really shook the institutions. But after the panel I was alone with these people, and it was hard for me. And they were telling me that it's not their fault that they're white, and that they were there, so it started with the tension. And if I had more experience, I would have handled it differently. But it happened like that.

Joel: And was it around this time that you and Sabelo met? When did that happen?

Sabelo Mlangeni: I think that was earlier.

Gabi: Way earlier. Because I think I had come back from Bard when I met you, kind of navigating Johannesburg.

Joel: Tell us about how you met.

Sabelo: I think for me, I'd heard about Gabi for sure. But the day I met her was at the MoMO gallery. It was a symposium of photography, or symposium around Santu Mofokeng. I think that's when we were first introduced. The community in Johannesburg is a very small community, so we sort of get into each other's spaces… I think when we first spent time was in Berlin. And we were already neighbors in Johannesburg, because we lived next to each other.

Gabi: You used to come and eat my food.

Sabelo: Yeah… I think we've been—over the years—I think friends even more outside work.

Gabi: And then we met in Berlin, actually, in 2014. This was in preparation for the eighth Berlin Biennale, which was curated by Juan Gaitán from Colombia. I got some kind of a scholarship to be with the Berlin Biennale, so I was in residency there.

Joel: As a curator?

Gabi: I don't know, it wasn't clear. But I had a studio and an apartment. And also Juan had come to Johannesburg to do part of his research, and I helped him with the research in Johannesburg, especially. But then he also invited CHR, the Center for Historical Reenactments, to the Biennale. So when I was there, I didn't understand the invitation and what we were supposed to do as CHR to create a new exhibition. In the end, I thought it would be interesting to do a publication, so we did a publication, which was a newspaper that we titled "Digging our graves 101." At that time, Sabelo was a resident artist at the academy, and you were going around Berlin taking photographs and then showing me these photographs. There was a photograph that Sabelo took of the construction sites of the Humboldt Forum, and I thought, "Amazing." So it became part of the publication, which was thinking about… we were thinking about different things. In South Africa, there was a Marikana massacre in 2012 where miners who were unhappy with the living wage were on strike in Marikana and Rustenburg—one of the mining towns in South Africa—and they were met with police brutality. Almost 34 miners were shot down and killed. That tragedy had just happened, and we were thinking about it. But also I think we were thinking about acts of self-sabotage as well. I was thinking about this story of Nongqawuse. She had a prophecy when she was 16 in the Eastern Cape around the 1840s. She was a member of the Xhosa. The ancestors came to her and said, "Everyone must kill the cattle and burn their crops. And on a certain day, the sun will rise differently and the white people will be driven back to sea." It was a big historical event, there were believers and unbelievers, and on said day, nothing happened, of course. But it led to a lot of famine and poverty in the Eastern Cape, which is still similar nowadays. I was thinking around that because she was then taken to Robben Island and arrested there. But I think she was hidden so that her people wouldn't kill her. Sir George Grey, the governor of the Cape at the time (who was then demoted to New Zealand), had a lot to do with constructing the story. We're thinking about that, which ultimately is the question around the land, and also thinking about mining, questions around the land and extraction. So that is the project that we did. And then when Sabelo was doing the series around Berlin, I thought, this also connects to that story of the Humboldt Forum which had been around since the early '90s, people protesting it. But, of course, it's connected to cultural memory in German museums, especially Berlin. A lot of people didn't know about that site, still don't know that was connected. I think that's the first time that we realized the project together.

Sabelo: Yes, that was the first time. And I think the second time was "The Mating Birds."

Gabi: "The Mating Birds."

Sabelo: "The Mating Birds." In Durban. You chose one work from the Country Girls. And I think the third one was “Handle with Care.” This was at Javett (Art Center, University of Pretoria)… sort of discussion over deciding on the poster of showing this book, not how it usually was, but in a poster presented like this. So I think in this work, I think he was talking a lot about masculinity… so, we, it was also this set and then also we had another set of images of poster from the "Country Girls." We had "Men Only" (an image from Country Girls).

Gabi: We had that image. What's her name?

Sabelo: "Bigboy"?

Gabi: "Bigboy," which was more popular than this one.

Joel: Gabi, can you talk a bit about the context of "Handle With Care"?

Gabi: So "Handle with Care"—when I arrived at the Javett Art Centre, it was in November 2020. There was in the plans for an exhibition of works from the South32 Collection, which had just been in on loan for a period of ten years at the Javett Center. This collection had different names since it was started in 1994 as part of Gencor, it was called the Gencor Collection because it belonged to the mining company Gencor, which was then bought by BHP Billiton, and then the collection was called the BHP Billiton collection, and then South32 bought out BHP Billiton, and now it's called the South32, which is an Australian mining and minerals company. But I think the collection is great because for a corporate collection to have collected works that are considered brave—you know, most corporate collections would play it safe. Nothing too political, nice pictures. But here you feel the tensions of the time, works that kind of speak to each other, scorn each other, they pull things out of each other. So, as a corporate collection, I think the first curator who was responsible for collecting or identifying work was an artist, Kendell Geers, who's now based in Belgium, who also had a practice as an artist that was considered controversial and political. So the collection has these elements. There is a work in the collection by Pat Mautloa titled "Handle with Care." It's made out of packaging material, it is very small, and the title comes from there. We divided the exhibition into four themes: rituals of self-preservation, dreamscapes, the constructions of masculinities, and obstruction. I thought it would be interesting to invite artists who were guests when the collection was actively being assembled, who were not in the scene, too young, or not practicing yet, were not part of the collection, to introduce each of these sub-themes that we identified. In this room that you see here is the part of the exhibition that was titled "The Constructions of Masculinities." All works are created by men as well, because I thought when we talk about masculinity, this is a conversation that should be led by men as well. And so there's different kinds of energies happening there: military, the war, the border war of the '80s, which is a big, secret, untold story. It was white young men who were sent to this war, which was fought in Namibia or Angola around those conflicts. And just like hostel life, you know, the painting there by—you don't see very well, but it's by Trevor Makhoba—is titled "Mans Tehuis," which translates as "The Men's Hostel," so the juxtaposition with the men only in the hostels versus Sabelo’s work was quite interesting in that way. These two photographs from these two series—we call them prototypes, or keys to unlock these themes. The conversation with Sabelo was like "let's make posters," which is, of course, fair enough. But it does mean that a lot of people have these posters in their houses, so they were take-away posters.

Sabelo: I bump into people and they say, "I have your poster."

Joel: Why weren't you sure about it? What didn't you like?

Sabelo: I always presented my work in that kind of framed, classic tradition, and sometimes to be pulled out of that takes a little bit of convincing. But that was why we're having this conversation. I'm also interested—just before this kind of interaction, in this way, this poster speaks of that fact that people can take something and talk about it.

Joel: And is that what you liked about it? The interactive element, people taking the work away?

Gabi: I can't remember. But I think there was something interesting about the take-home aspect of a photographic image. I think what I learned from it, in retrospect, there were a lot of conversations around the two images, you could actually see which pile went first, which was interesting, and it was definitely the "Country Girls," "Bigboy," I don't know if you know that image.

Joel: I think it's one of the ones we've looked at. I don't know if people remember.

Gabi: She's standing behind the tent, dressed up. Some people were like, "Oh, this is Miriam Makeba." Amazing. We were like, "Oh, okay, this is quite interesting." And other people would look at this and say, "Oh, this is so interesting and intimate," this particular one of the hostels. Other people, especially queer-identifying people, would kind of freak out around this image because they would think, "These are the people who call us names out there." So that was interesting in that sense, but it kind of becomes a thing that people take home which means something lives out there in whatever way. I like this idea that when people take things then you never understand where they go. One of my favorite projects that we did at CHR was creating these t-shirts. This is a project that we did outside in Johannesburg, and these t-shirts that were written, borrowing from Superflex, "Foreigners, please don't leave us alone with the tourists." I think Superflex was with the Danes. And then we put them in a bus that was going to Zambia, in Lusaka, and people started to wear them in the bus and then the bus was gone. And so I think this idea of a takeaway—because one statement is a statement in an exhibition, but when it moves out of that it has a different life that we will never understand, and I thought that was interesting.

Joel: Some things you need to consider with your proposals. So as the class project is what most people are drawing up: a proposal for an exhibition. I think we haven't really thought about takeaways yet, which is quite intriguing. So we've got about half an hour left. I have lots of questions, but I want to make sure that you all have time. So now's your moment if you have anything you want to ask Gabi or Sabelo.

Gabi: Maybe let's just talk about "Mating Birds Volume Two," because you touched on it but we didn't delve in because that was the second project that I worked with Sabelo on. It's based on a novel by Lewis Nkosi, a South African writer who spent a lot of time outside in exile. But it's set in Durban, where I come from, in the east coast of South Africa, and the book itself is one of my favorite pieces of literature. It's also a very difficult subject, but it's also located around the Immorality Act of South Africa, which prevented white people and Black people from having intimate relationships or even marrying and so it's set around the time. With that project I was interested too, because also Lewis was from Durban, it was set in Durban. He was also obsessed with Durban and the beach area. It's set at the beach, when the beaches themselves were also segregated. It's a novel written from a Black man's voice who was narrating from prison where he's awaiting a death penalty because of having raped a white woman. I was interested in the beach space because not very long before that project, and then what compelled me to do the project, there was someone writing on … so Durban is famous for local holidays in December. All kinds of South Africans flock to Durban, it's packed at the beach. Someone went to Facebook, a white woman, and said, "All these monkeys at the beach, we can't enjoy our beach anymore." So the beach has always been this contested space. I mean, even now, without the borders, if you go very, very south, who you will find, and then central, who you will find, and then further down, like in that stretch of the beach, and so I was interested in that but also interested to look at the exhibition through the Immorality Act, because part of the Immorality Act was also sodomy laws—same-sex relationships were part of that act. I was also interested in the numbers of people who were arrested because of the act. The highest number was Black women, which was interesting. The very lowest number was white women, but the highest number was Black women with white men. This really speaks of power and power engagements, and how the country was structured. Of course, Black people in the urban areas had to have permission from their employers to be in the city. If you didn't have this document, you were sent back to the homelands. So this was because of the power dynamics. And I guess what I would regard as a sex industry, or just curiosity also—I mean, most of these people who were convicted were convicted around the part of Joburg where you live, Hillbrow, so around that area, which was also a mixing area for people. I was quite interested in that. So I invited somebody to show "Country Girls" but …

Sabelo: … a very intimate image of two lovers. Two lovers. Two male lovers.

Gabi: Somebody and their boyfriend who's a soccer player. Yeah. So that was the context.

Joel: Where was that shown?

Gabi: In Durban, at the KZNSA gallery. KZNSA stands for KwaZulu-Natal Society of the Arts. It used to be NSA, and then the region was changed to KwaZulu-Natal instead of just Natal, and it became KZNSA.

Student Question: Any other artists' work that you had in that exhibition?

Gabi: It was also a very archival exhibition, so I had some archival materials. Things were treated in this way. Sabelo was a photographer. And then there was also the painter. The painter, what's his name? [Laughs] Trevor Makhoba, who made this painting...

Joel: And then one from your "men only" from the men-only spaces of the mining hostels?

Gabi: I titled the "Mating Birds: Volume Two" because there's a book called "Mating Birds." There was also a work by Trevor Makhoba titled, "Great Temptation in the Garden." Treated archivally some images taken by Zanele Muholi kind of exploring that relationship, especially between the domestic worker and the master.

Student Question: My question is going back to your first point, about the qualifications for being a curator. Could someone in the STEM program for undergrads pursue curation?

Christina: I think it depends a lot on what kind of context you're interested in working in. Honestly, I think that, I mean, this museum, the curators all have PhDs in art history or archaeology. But this is definitely not the only context that you can work as a curator. And I think, as Gabi's discussed, there's also always an opportunity to create your own platform and your own community and that can be in more or less formal spaces. I think to me, some of the more interesting curatorial frameworks that I've seen are ones that are outside of a very formalized institution. And then, especially as you get older, there's another question about how you're making a living and so I think that also depends on: Is this something you want to do experimentally on the side of another job or another practice, or is this something you want to make a living doing? And what kind of audience are you interested in reaching? I mean, to me, the trade-off that makes it worthwhile to work in a more formalized institution is that there's often a broader audience that you can reach. But that depends also, again, on the broader cultural context. In a bigger city in the United States, like an artist-run platform, a temporary, more ephemeral platform that people set up in a space that they convert or use for a certain purpose for a time, is going to often be a more localized audience of artists and people who organizers know. Whereas people who are interested in coming to see art, and are normally already embedded in a certain community, will look up what's going on at SFMOMA and go there. So to me, those are some of the different compromises you have to make depending on where you want to work. Sorry to make the answer more complicated. I remember at Bard, sometimes getting frustrated because you'd hear big-name curators, like Chrissy Iles, come in and I felt like there was a start to a curatorial talk from a curator of older generations that always started with, "Oh, these programs are ridiculous. I didn't study in a program like this." I was in an elevator with somebody one day in London and we just started talking and before I knew it, he was the head curator of the Tate. Could you please stop sharing that story? All of us in this room who are invested in this in one degree or another and are currently investing a lot of time and studying this are highly aware that at this moment, it is competitive, and it's fraught and those terms about where you want to produce projects and who you're producing them for, it was already so clear to us that it was steeped in compromise no matter where you chose to position yourself. I think that that's something that's also changed a lot over time. But I've worked with curators—not an academic museum, necessarily, like this one—but at bigger museums, formal institutions, that are artists that have an MFA if they have a degree. And then I've also worked with people who had academic degrees but they were in English or something like that. So I think there's no one pathway. But if you want to work at a museum like this, you need a PhD in art history or something like that.

Gabi: For example, I just got a new job in Rotterdam. It's an art institute, not a collection. I was never asked for any certificate. Of course, you have your CV, you've shown what you've been doing, so that's why you've been hired. Sometimes, in other institutions, it's not about the qualification because this qualification means nothing without a demonstrated practice or history.

Christina: It's also worth pointing out that I don't have a PhD, so I snuck in the side door somehow. I'm working in the educational department, but quite happy with what I'm doing. So I think that there's different tracks.

Student Question: I have a question for Gabi. Thank you for sharing so much about your practice. We've been talking a lot about audience and context in this class, and how a creative chooses what to explain to the audience, especially in an international context. So I was wondering what your approach to that is. Do you include explanatory labels, or do you let the art speak for itself?

Gabi: Yeah, I guess it depends where I'm doing the project. Because also I'd like to keep things as open as possible. But sometimes to keep things open, you have to construct that openness. Sometimes things don't open by themselves. At times, I feel like I think this particular project—if it's a group show, for example—this needs a broader context because it may help to connect the dots with something else. I think it's good to trust that people can create their own narratives. I think, the more you give people—that's just me—the lazier they become. I also don't like to do walkabouts—oh God, kill me! [Laughter] But I've developed a strategy around that: I create prompts and I put these prompts in their heads and then whoever comes to a walkabout, I just ask anyone to read something and then it starts a conversation. So I would rather have a dialogue, where people also can share what they think, what they see, how they feel. And then I find that more interesting for everybody, including me, because sometimes also, as I work, there's things that I don't see, or I see them differently. And then all of a sudden there's this other kind of perspective that I didn't think of, and I think that's how we grow. So when people do these walkabouts, I think that space of your actual growth, as well, with the group that you're with, it becomes very limited. I always want to engage with people in ways that I don't leave myself out of it, because I don't know everything. So that's my approach to information sharing.

Student Question: Thanks so much for your insights during the talk yesterday, as well as your responses to some of our questions. I'd love to hear you speak a little bit more about your work as an independent curator within the context of the university. In other words, what does that have to do with my space the university serves? What purpose does it serve your practice? And how does that differ from if you're independent?

Gabi: Well, I guess it differs a lot. I've been always working also with institutions, but independently, because I'm also interested in institutions. Which is why I and some colleagues formulated the word last night, I called them pseudo-institutions. They basically make spaces to experiment, the dream institutions that we would like to see that do not gravitate towards what is already known, as if that has been working. Meanwhile, it has been working for some people and not for many people. I have collaborated with many, many institutions here in the U.S., in Europe, in South Africa, and on the continent of Africa. So I do enter institutions, but I like the position of entering as an independent voice. Because I can be more—I don't want to say brave—but more I can face things. Sometimes when you work in an institution, you have to adopt an institutional voice and I think this is what I've learned at Javett. It's just not about my crazy ideas anymore. I have to speak as an institution. Luckily, the job that I started is at a new institution that was only opened in 2019. And that's exactly why I thought it would be interesting, because it didn't have a voice yet, and I wanted to influence that voice. I want to influence until I can't. An institution is an institution, which is fine, but there's a moment—I think it happens after two years—where they are like, okay, great with your crazy ideas. This lets you know you can create something that is more sustainable. There's the stakeholders and sustainability and then all these questions, which, of course are very important for institutions. I had to be more disciplined within myself, which I do appreciate. But also I was in a position to be able to invite other people, who are going to be able to see these things, to be my behind-the-scenes voice. Like the project that I did with Nolan Oswald Dennis. Looking at the collection of Mapungubwe there is at Javett that I spoke about last night, that was exactly that, because I knew that the corporate collection was a headache and knew that I as an insider couldn't say this. But I can bring an artist to say it. So I guess as an independent worker I was also very much insisting that I'm an artist. Not because I'm in a studio making things, but because there was my approach to questions. And sometimes it was also a way of allowing myself—if I can't convince someone, even an artist, that it needs to move that way, it was a way to permit myself to just move it that way so that I can see what happens. It was a way to pivot myself to touch things, to collaborate, to have an idea of how I like to shape it.

Student Question: Full disclosure, I'm Zimbabwean. I have a lot of questions. What does restitution look like in a situation like that?

Gabi: Oh, that's very interesting, because when we talk about restitution, we talk of it from a Western perspective. But actually, within the continent of Africa, there's claimants to these artifacts, but there's about eight communities who say, "These are ours," and that's why the state has said, "This is a national treasure." So it's protected by the state; it belongs to the state, not the university. The university is a custodian. Back in Mapungubwe, there is what they call an interpretation center. So when you go to the actual site, they've built this interpretation site, which has the (Golden) Rhino, because the rhino is the most important symbol of Mapungubwe. And it's fake right now. This happens a lot. Sometimes these people in the news on TV or somewhere who say, "Those are our things. We're coming, we know where they are now." And then the security at Javett Art Centre is so intense because of that. And we pay a lot of money for security because of this gold. In the Mapungubwe collection, it's fixed so that if there's anything that happens, the doors can shut by themselves, so it's very intense. This collection is upstairs in this. If you Google the Javett Art Centre, you will see there's this concrete structure which is called the Gold Tower. So it was always planned that the collection will move from the university, from UK museums, to Javett Art Centre. And then on the ground floor, there is another collection which is also a headache. It is called the AngloGold Ashanti Barbier-Mueller Collection of West African Gold. It was collected in whatever way in the Gold Coast—so Ghana, Ivory Coast, maybe even Nigeria—by this Swiss couple, and they were collecting from 1922. But we don't know how they were collecting because also these objects of royalty—the Ashanti, for example—now they are owned by AngloGold, which is another mining company … there are a lot of mining narratives. This is the room where the Mapungubwe is and this image is from a conversation that we were having around the table. It was also featuring people who are looking at the collection from a spiritual perspective. When we were thinking of this conversation, the university people, the historians, they were very upset that we, for example, invited Mathole Motshekga, who is a professor, but he also has his own institute called the Kara (Heritage) Institute, and is interested in these questions from a very spiritual point of view, which is not kind of allowed, or is disapproved. The professors in the university, they're like, "We don't know this man. Who is he?" But he's also a professor and he was also in government at some point. And he comes also from this Rain Prayer lineage. In fact, right now he is the one responsible for taking care of Queen Modjadji, who is known as the Rain Queen. The Mapua people wear rain prayers, too. So he's very connected to this collection, not from a very personal point of view but in a very spiritual one. So we get the questions. When the Germans come, they ask, "When are you taking these things back?" because that is the question that Germans received up there. It is something that I've discussed with Raphael Chikukwa at the Zimbabwe National Gallery. Also at the Zimbabwe National Gallery, there are these artworks, objects, from Ivory Coast. You never know how they work, or what was the root, but the root basically has to do with the history of museums on the African continent that were also established as an expansion to the colonial project. They were run by white museum practitioners, and someone would say, "Hey, do you have a mask over there? I'll give you a drum." And then these objects, just via handshakes, they would just travel, and so they sit in these museums, and nobody knows how they got there. I find that fascinating, and I think it is a story that we can tell from that perspective. The museum also was started by a bequest of Western art. So the National Gallery in Cape Town is the bequest of Sir (Abe) Bailey, of English sporting paintings and drawings. But the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, for example, had some works from Italy—I can't remember, from the fifteenth century?—legitimately purchased by the museum when Zimbabwe was still Rhodesia, so they belong to the museum. The Italian Embassy in Harare found out about these works, and then Italy borrowed them, maybe ten years ago, but then they didn't bother to bring them back. And so there was a lot of negotiation and lobbying from the museum in Harare to the Italian Embassy to bring back these things that belonged to Zimbabwe. Eventually they came back. And so I think those kinds of movements are also quite interesting because we don't talk about that.

Student Question: Do you imagine a much more complicated approach to ownership in terms of how we think of a lot of these types of objects, where these lines and these borders didn't exist at some point? You have to work around them.

Gabi: I don't know. I think there's some artists whose practices are interested in thinking about this. One of them is Edgar Calel, for example, and I think there's examples now in the Tate, even in the Hartwig Foundation, because Sohrab Mohebbi at the SculptureCenter commissioned Edgar, and it was really interesting. What is most interesting about this commission is the contract itself, because the objects themselves are not there. This is just instructions about who should come from that group of people to come and activate this project, this artwork or objects, but they are not physically there. So I think there are ways in which artists and maybe other people beyond artists who were thinking about intervening in these spaces in interesting ways that are worth investigating. It's not as easy as taking the thing from here and bringing it back to Harare or to Johannesburg, because those objects are no longer our history. They're also European history. So it just means that we still need to do the hard work of thinking about these projects. For me, I don't know. Some of them needed to be burned after the ritual and so it just means that there's these healing and spiritual practices that were never completed because this object was displaced, and what does that mean for a people? These are interesting but hard questions to think about.

Student Question: Also considering that the lineage of the caretakers of those objects also was broken because of the loss of history.