Browsing by Author "Setai, Phokeng Tshepo"

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    Contemporary black African curatorial practice: Three biographic studies in strategy
    (University of the Western Cape, 2024) Setai, Phokeng Tshepo; Gillespie, Kelly; Taylor, Jane
    This doctoral thesis is an interpretive study of the emergence of contemporary curatorial practice on the African continent. The inquiry charts the rise of the practice of curating in postcolonial Africa, casting a biographical lens on the curatorial strategies of three pre-eminent contemporary Black-African curators — Koyo Kouoh, Ntone Edjabe and Gabi Ngcobo. It pays particular attention to the conceptual and methodological approaches these individuals have utilised in their negotiation of the emergent genre of curatorial practice on the African continent; in the context of a neoliberalising landscape in the global contemporary art-world. This thesis is an exploration of the present-day expanded role of contemporary curatorial practice, and the nascent formations of cultural production emerging from the rise of the curator — models of which have helped to situate the role of the curatorial practitioner at the political centre of our contemporary moment in the African and global art-world. This thesis problematises the function of contemporary curatorial practitioners in Africa by leading an examination into how three contemporary Black African curators are reconfiguring the historical and contemporary epistemic articulations of the practice in the present. Central to this research’s inquiry is understanding the thinking implemented by Black African curators in their curatorial practices and discovering what influence their pedagogies have on existing modes of cultural production on the African continent.