Ngcobo in Transitions

The South African curator, writer and artist, Gabi Ngcobo, will be in town on Saturday, July 25, 2009. Ngcobo will speak on the topic “Transitions” at the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Yaba, Lagos, from 2 pm. The South African’s visit is part of the discussion forum on visual art and culture issues initiated by the CCA in 2007.

The Commonwealth Foundation is funding the forum featuring the artist who had been scheduled to give a talk at the “Like a Virgin” exhibition held earlier in the year at the centre.

“Transition has its own constraints, life forms, threatening dynamics and consequences. During transition, the questions ‘who are we?’ alongside ‘which options among the available ones are the right ones? tend to figure a lot.

"In this talk, Gabi Ngcobo will underline such questions by focusing on the work of a younger generation of South African artists whose work addresses the shortcomings of sexual identities more especially black South African masculinities. The aim of the talk is to create a dialogue about history (or its absence) that is often troubled, to differing degrees, by the search to find the holy grail of African masculinity,” a statement from the organisers said.

Ngcobo has worked as assistant curator at the South African Gallery and curated Cape Africa Platform’s CAPE 07 bi-annual exhibition where she also worked as head of research. She was instrumental in initiating Cape’s Young Curator’s Programme. Ngcobo co-curated “Olvida quen soy/ Erase me from who I am” with Elvira Dyangani in the Canary Islands, Las Palmas, in 2006.

She has also collaborated with the Cape Town collective, Gugulective for “Titled/Untitled.” She is the co-founder of collaborative platform “manje-manje projects” (m-mp) whose first project, a group exhibition titled “Scratching the Surface Vol.1” took place in Cape Town in 2008. She is a Ford Foundation Fellow at the Centre for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York.