Kabelo Malatsie is a curator and organizer living in Bern. Her ongoing curatorial research project explores the exhibitionary mode as an unlikely starting point that places incongruous practices together, to instigate other ways of making and reading the world we inhabit. As an organizer Malatsie is preoccupied with the notion of autonomy, specifically temporary autonomous zones within the African context. For her talk, she takes the quote by Kodwo Eshun as a starting point:

Listening to oneself listening. Listening to emotions, and frictions of emotions. And then one has to decide what those frictions of emotions are. What is the tension they are generating, the rub between them. And then one has to name them-naming the parameters of emotions because you want to get the modulations of emotion. Listening to the act of your own listening, but also how this bounces back from the other, most of the times that’s what it is all about.[1]

She is the director of Kunsthalle Bern since April 2022. Previously she was director of Visual Arts Network of South Africa (2018-2019) and she was an associate in the curatorial team at Stevenson gallery in Cape Town and Johannesburg (2011 – 2016). As a freelance curator, she recently co-curated the exhibition Deliberation on Discursive Justice for the Yokohama Triennale (2020), participated In the Open or in Stealth for Barcelona’s MACBA (2018), and curated solo exhibitions across various institutions in South Africa and Kunsthalle Bern. Malatsie holds a Master’s degree in Art History from the University of Witwatersrand.

The lecture will be held in English language.

[1] Kodwo Eshun, Interview for Mediatec, [online video], 1999, as found at http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=RivGWj1LoQ

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