Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung to Curate Bienal de São Paulo

Conversation Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung Mohammad Salemy and Patrick Schabus

Fundação Bienal de São Paulo has announced Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung the Chief Curator of the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, scheduled for the second half of 2025.

The Cameroon-born curator earned a doctorate in biotechnology before serving as the founding director of Berlin art space SAVVY Contemporary from 2009. He was appointed director and chief curator of the German capital’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt in January 2023 and works as a professor at the Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin.

‘The Bienal de São Paulo seems to me to be a seismograph that not only records the different tremblements the world is experiencing socioeconomically, geopolitically, and environmentally, but these records also give us the possibilities of shaping a more just, humanitarian future for all animate and inanimate beings on this planet,’ Ndikung said in a statement.

Speaking to Ocula in 2019, Ndikung emphasised the importance of decolonising minds, playing with the refusal of not being an ‘other’ (a deliberate double-negation), and building explicitly on the work of others.

‘In the so-called “art world”, people act like explorers,’ he said. ‘They act like Christopher Columbus. They want to be the one that discovers shit. In most cases, most of them discover nothing new. This is actually about the politics of referencing.’

‘We are proud to say that we build on the work that was done before us. You can think of it as a notion of ancestry,’ he said. —[O]

Main image: Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung. Courtesy Fundação Bienal de São Paulo. Photo: Jana Edisonga.