The South African curator Gabi Ngcobo will head the tenth Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, due to take place in the summer of 2018.
Ngcobo has most recently co-curated the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo (until 11 December) and in 2007 co-curated the Cape07 Biennale in Cape Town. She will join an illustrious list of past curators of the Berlin Biennale, among them Hans Ulrich Obrist, Maurizio Cattelan and Ute Meta Bauer.
Ngcobo is a founding member of the Nothing Gets Organised (NGO) collective and the now-defunct Center for Historical Re-enactments, a collaborative art platform for research and discussion. She also teaches at the Wits School of Arts, University of Witwatersrand. Ngcobo currently divides her time between Johannesburg and São Paulo, but will move to the German capital in the run up to the biennial.
She follows the New York-based collective DIS who organised this year’s Berlin Biennale, which received mixed reviews.
The Berlin Biennale styles itself “as an ‘open space’ that experiments, identifies and critically examines the latest trends in the art world”, according to a statement on its website. The biennial was founded in 1996 by the then director of Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Klaus Biesenbach, with a group of collectors and patrons. Its first edition took place in 1998.
