Pidginization as Curatorial Method: Messing with Languages and Praxes of Curating
Dr. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Steven Henry Madoff
Sternberg Press
English
Softcover
64 pages
112 x 178 mm
2023
ISBN 9781915609083
In this compelling rethinking of curatorial practice, renowned museum director, curator, and writer Dr. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung proposes that Pidgin languages and pidginization as a mode of being and doing offer a decolonialized reinvention of communicative practices—a space in which the boundaries between disciplines of knowledge collapse and sociopolitical, economic, ethical, and spiritual concepts and questions are renegotiated. Written as a series of powerful anecdotes, the book grounds its provocative ideas in personal, cultural, and political histories of challenge and improvisation, and argues, as Ndikung writes, that “pidginized curating is a curating that combines works, ideas, practices, and languages in resistance to canonical conventions, cultural stasis, ossified practices, dead rhythms, and singular forms.”
(source: https://www.sternberg-press.com/product/pidginization-as-curatorial-method/)
About the Author
Dr. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (b. 1977, Yaoundé) is a Cameroonian independent curator, author and biotechnologist. He is founder and artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin and is the artistic director of Sonsbeek20–24, a quadrennial contemporary art exhibition in Arnhem, the Netherlands. He is artistic director of the 13th Bamako Encounters 2022, a biennale for African photography in Mali. Ndikung was the curator-at-large for Adam Szymczyk’s Documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany in 2017; a guest curator of the Dak’Art biennale in Dakar, Senegal in 2018; as well as artistic director of the 12th Bamako Encounters in 2019. Together with the Miracle Workers Collective, he curated the Finland Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019. He was a recipient of the first OCAD University International Curators Residency fellowship in Toronto in 2020 and is currently a professor in the Spatial Strategies MA program at the Weissensee Academy of Art in Berlin.
(source: http://www.rawmaterialcompany.org/_3526?lang=en)
About the Editor
Steven Henry Madoff is the founding chair of the Masters in Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Previously, he served as senior critic at Yale University’s School of Art. He lectures internationally on such subjects as the history of interdisciplinary art, contemporary art, and art pedagogy. He has served as executive editor of ARTnews magazine and as president and editorial director of AltaCultura, a project of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His books include What About Activism? (editor) from Sternberg Press; Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century) from MIT Press; Pop Art: A Critical History from University of California Press; Christopher Wilmarth: Light and Gravity from Princeton University; To Seminar (contributor) from Metropolis M Books; After the Educational Turn: Critical Art Pedagogies and Decolonialism (contributor) from Black Dog Press; Fabricating Publics (contributor) from Open Humanities Press; and Thoughts on Curating from Sternberg Press (series editor).
(source: https://www.macp.sva.edu/steven-henry-madoff)
About the Publisher
Sternberg Press grew out of the small publishing house known as Lukas & Sternberg, founded in 1999 by Caroline Schneider. With a focus on art criticism, theory, fiction, and artists’ books, the Berlin-New York based publishing endeavor was set in motion with a pocket book series—edited in part with Nicolaus Schafhausen. Dedicated to an expanded notion of writing on art, Sternberg Press has created a formidable platform in which practitioners from the fields of art and culture (architecture, design, film, politics, literature, and philosophy) can engage in a critical discourse. Each book is a special object celebrating creative publishing at its best, based on both meticulous editorial decisions and distinctive design. Through both commissioned and translated works, Sternberg Press seeks out the blind spots within contemporary discourse and offers a timely response to the related debates.
sternberg-press.com
(source: https://www.sternberg-press.com/about/)
