Khanyisile Mbongwa

Khanyisile Mbongwa is a South African born Finnish based curatorial theorist and sociologist whose practice centers the principles of Care and Cure, engaging creativity as a transmutive force for emancipatory practice, joy, play, and Black aliveness. Her work makes space for liberatory futures by positioning the creative as both method and medium for imagination and transformation. Her interdisciplinary curatorial practice draws from ecology, ancestral and indigenous knowledge systems, and contemporary art’s liberatory strategies. She collaborates with artists whose work engages land, water, cosmology, and the body as living archives—sites of territory, memory, and cartography. Mbongwa is particularly drawn to practices exploring the human condition, Black aesthetic time, trans-indigeneity, the Black radical tradition, BIPOC-queer imaginaries, and radical Black-Indigenous world-making. At the heart of her work is the philosophy of Care and Cure as ethical and relational tools for building possible narratives. Care functions as a political and spiritual praxis, asking how institutions might honor artists in their wholeness—as people, makers, and carriers of sacred histories. Cure enables spaces where resistance, memory, and reimagination can unfold, allowing artworks to disrupt silence and generate new possibilities. Mbongwa’s curatorial approach is guided by a dual methodology she calls Forensic and Ancestral Listening. Forensic Listening attends carefully to historical residues within archives, institutions, and landscapes, remaining alert to silence, absence, violence, and resistance. Ancestral Listening is a cosmological method attuned to knowledge carried through land, body, dream, and memory, recognizing ancestors as guides and collaborators. Together these practices shape a curatorial language that is intellectual and intuitive, critical and ceremonial, refusing divisions between theory and embodiment, politics and spirituality, past and future, archive and living memory, making curating a practice of relation, responsibility, imagination, repair, and collective becoming across time, place, and community, grounding artistic collaboration in care, reciprocity, attentiveness, and emancipatory possibility for artists, audiences, alike.

Curatorial In heritance: What the Practice Becomes in my Mouth

This paper thinks with curatorial inheritance as a practice of receiving, carrying, and tending to a field shaped by colonial violence. I ask what it means for a Black girl from the township to inherit curating—a practice entangled with colonial extraction, the displacement of sacred and cultural objects, the making of genocidal collections, and the ordering of people and worlds through regimes of knowledge and possession. Rather than approaching this inheritance through refusal alone, I stay with its difficulty and contradiction: what does it mean to inherit a practice whose histories are violent, while also finding oneself implicated in, and capable of reshaping, its continuities? I consider inheritance not as the passive transmission of an intact practice, but as something that changes as it moves, as it is carried by different bodies, histories, and ways of knowing. From this position, I ask what curating might become when it is languaged through Black and Indigenous life, memory, relation, and care. What happens when a colonial practice enters another mouth? What can it be made to say, hold, tend to, or release? The paper therefore attends to the possibilities of making curatorial language and practice more nimble and otherwise: capable of untangling inherited violences, unmasking their afterlives, and making room for other ways of relating to objects, histories, and one another. I write from within inheritance rather than outside it, asking not how to purify the practice, but how to tend to what has been handed down and listen for what it might yet become.