searching for noon at two o'clock: a conversation with Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Manuela Moscoso

Please join us on Friday, December 1 for searching for noon at two o'clock a conversation with Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and CARA's Executive Director and Chief Curator Manuela Moscoso. Ndikung and Moscoso will discuss curatorial practice, and the possibilities of music and poetry as method, especially in moments when language fails.

About the Speakers

Prof. Dr. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung is a curator, author and biotechnologist, currently serving as director and chief curator of Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) Berlin, Germany. He is founder and was artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin, the artistic director of sonsbeek20–24, a quadrennial contemporary art exhibition in Arnhem, the Netherlands, and was the curator-at-large for Adam Szymczyk’s Documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany in 2017. Ndikung was guest curator of the Dak’Art biennale in Dakar, Senegal, in 2018; and the artistic director of the 12th and 13th Bamako Encounters photography biennial in Mali in 2019 and 2022. Together with the Miracle Workers Collective, he curated the Finland Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, 2019. He was a guest professor in curatorial studies and sound art at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, and he is currently a professor in and head of the faculty of Spatial Strategies MA program at the Weissensee Academy of Art in Berlin. He was recipient of the first OCAD University International Curators Residency fellowship in Toronto in 2020. His published works include, inter alia, The Delusions of Care (2021), An Ongoing-Offcoming Tale: Ruminations on Art, Culture, Politics and Us/Others (2022) and Pidginization as Curatorial Method (2023)."

Manuela Moscoso is a curator and critical producer. Moscoso is the inaugural Executive Director of Center for Art Research and Alliances (CARA) in New York City. In her practice, Moscoso studies the process of artmaking and its effects in the world. Inspired by non-western forms of thinking, Manuela is researching a different understanding of embodiment, porosity, kinship and digestion as a way to challenge the western conception of the body and its relationships. Manuela is part of the advisory committee of the Helsinki Biennial 22-23, and is the former curator of the Liverpool Biennial 2021: "The Stomach and The Port.” Until 2018, she was the Senior Curator at Tamayo Museo in Mexico City. She co-founded and ran Zarigüeya, a program that activates relations between contemporary art and the pre-Columbian collection of the Museo Casa del Alabado, Ecuador between 2014-2018. In 2014, she was the associate curator of the Bienal de Cuenca 12, in Ecuador, and previously she was co-director of Capacete, a residency programme based in Brazil where she also co-ran the curatorial programme, Typewriter.