Gabi Ngcobo

What are we keeping alive when we keep an institution alive?

Gabi Ngcobo

Director, Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam, Netherlands.

This question has followed me through different institutional and para-institutional experiments: the Center for Historical Reenactments (CHR), NGO – Nothing Gets Organized –, the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria, and now Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam. I hesitate to describe these as a trajectory. A trajectory suggests that one thing leads neatly to another, that knowledge accumulates, that institutions become progressively more resolved. My experience has been much less orderly.

CHR began from an understanding that history does not sit obediently in the past. It circulates. It repeats, mutates, accumulates and appears again in the present, sometimes wearing different clothes. NGO emerged from another question: what happens when we resist the compulsion to organize ourselves into recognizable institutional forms? What kinds of gathering, study, friendship, antagonism, and work become possible, or impossible, when organization itself remains a question?

At Javett-UP, the proposition of a “living academy” allowed me to think about the collection not as something that waits to be activated by us, but as something already entangled in social, political, and epistemological relations. And now, at Kunstinstituut Melly, I encounter these questions from another geography and from within an institution carrying its own histories, contradictions, and responsibilities.

Across these experiences, I have become increasingly interested in maintenance. Not maintenance as the quiet labor of keeping everything as it is. Not maintenance as institutional survival at all costs. But maintenance as a political question.

Biography:

Gabi Ngcobo is the Director of Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam, NL. Between 2020 and 2023 she was Curatorial Director at the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria (Javett-UP) where she organized the exhibitions Handle with Care (2021) and Scenorama (2022) as well solo presentations and new commissions by Oscar Murillo, Nolan Oswald Dennis, and Luana Vitra. In 2022 Ngcobo curated The Show is Over at the South London Gallery and co-curated (with Murillo) The ‘t’ is Silent at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenes in Deurle, Belgium. Before joining Javett-UP, Ngcobo worked on independent curatorial projects, collaborated with various institutions in different parts of the world, and for seven years lectured at the Wits School of Arts in Johannesburg. In 2018, she curated the 10th Berlin Biennale titled We Don’t Need Another Hero and was one of the co-curators of the 32nd Sao Paulo Biennial titled Incenteza Viva (2016). She is a founding member of the Johannesburg-based collaborative platforms NGO – Nothing Gets Organised (2016-) and the Center for Historical Reenactments (2010-14).