As he takes the helm of Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung discusses cultural boycotts, racism in Germany and ‘curatorial justice’

“I got here to Germany in 1997 after I was 20 years previous, with 300 Deutsche marks in my pocket and one suitcase,” says the curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, who not too long ago took the helm of Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW, Home of World Cultures). “I entered a society that was very racialised, and through which folks like me skilled quite a lot of racism.”

Talking in particular person to The Artwork Newspaper, Ndikung factors out that he’s sitting a stone’s throw away from the place the African continent was partitioned by Western imperial powers in 1884 on the Berlin Convention held on the former Reichskanzlerpalais constructing: “If I did not have this in thoughts, I won’t have the ability to do the work the best way I am doing it. I consider in curatorial justice”. Exterior Ndikung’s workplace, a latest exhibition by the investigative artist collective Forensic Structure on the far-right murders in Hanau in 2020 is being dismantled.

Ndikung succeeds the German curator Bernd Scherer, who retired on the finish of December after 17 years in workplace. It’s important for Germany, no less than symbolically, that he has been appointed to guide the HKW, probably the most outstanding cultural establishments within the nation, whose curvilinear construction Berliners consult with playfully because the “pregnant oyster”. Constructed intentionally excessive so it may very well be seen from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) over the Berlin Wall, the constructing was initially a congress corridor gifted by the US to Western Germany. 66 years later, the wall not stands, however Germany faces new divisions.

Since 1987, the HKW has served as a nationwide discussion board for modern artwork and demanding debate. As its first African-born and Black director—certainly one of a small handful of such institutional leaders in Germany—his appointment means that nationwide establishments are starting to diversify.

Born within the Cameroonian capital of Yaoundé in 1977, Ndikung left the previous German colony to review biochemistry (through which he has a doctorate) in Berlin. He ultimately left science to discovered the Berlin exhibition house Savvy Modern in 2008. Over time, he has turn out to be a outstanding voice within the German dialogue about looted artwork and restitution, having contributed or curated for among the world’s most prestigious worldwide artwork exhibitions, together with Documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens in 2015, in addition to presiding as a jury member of the 2022 Venice Biennale. Final yr, Ndikung walked out of his position as inventive director of the Sonksbeek 20-24 biennial within the Netherlands over the “precarious and finally insufferable” working situations confronted by him and his crew, writing in an open letter to the organising basis that they’d been “victims of sexism and institutional racism”.

He now finds himself caught between a rock and a tough place along with his latest submit, which can also be his most necessary inside a state framework. On the one hand, he should work round stifling paperwork to convey to the fore voices which have been traditionally neglected for many years, if not centuries. He should additionally handle mounting frustrations by artists from the International South and their diasporas—who lack company over their illustration within the artwork world—with out being accused of vetting, silencing or censorship. In brief, he finds himself on the centre of a tradition battle that repeatedly flares up inside Germany, whether or not eventually yr’s Documenta or on the Berlin Biennale.

“After I get up within the morning and have a look at myself within the mirror whereas brushing my tooth, I am not involved with issues of variety,” Ndikung says, punctuating his sentences with pregnant pauses. “As a result of the world I reside in is various. Whereas these predominantly white establishments need to simply have a drop of color and fetishise variety, we truly observe not solely the variety of peoples, however of epistemologies”.

Final month, Ndikung’s 17-person curatorial crew was introduced at a press convention in HKW’s wood-panelled auditorium. It contains the Senegalese curator Marie Helene Pereira, the Colombian artist Carlos Maria Romero (aka Atabey), the Filipina activist Rosa Cordillera A. Castillo, and the Cameroonian curator Dzekashu MacViban, in addition to Can Sungu, the Istanbul-born inventive director of the Berlin cultural centre Sinema Transtopia. Ndikung known as them on stage one after the other whereas the native band The Swag performed covers of Toni Braxton, The Roots, and Burna Boy. “What I do know is that if this home desires to be the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, it should do higher. It should be mirrored within the crew, within the programme and the guests” Nidkung tells The Artwork Newspaper.

The crew’s purpose, Ndikung stated on the time, is to contribute to the understanding of a world “that’s pregnant with many different worlds”. A world “assured sufficient to detach itself from the universe and name itself the ‘pluriverse'”. Within the coming years, the HKW programme will give attention to dance workshops, cultures of remembrance, and the implications of colonial historical past.

But Ndikung’s appointment additionally attracts fears amongst involved events that he’ll turn out to be a lightning rod for charged political debates in Germany. The Tamil author and researcher Sinthujan Varatharajah worries that the HKW will now face an onus to compensate for a nationwide dearth of variety within the arts. Moreover, regardless of Ndikung being a Berliner of virtually 20 years, Varatharajah argues that turning into HKW director makes him one other worldwide variety rent who might be pitted towards native ethnic minority communities. Varatharajah addresses this situation of their e-book English in Berlin: Exclusions in a Cosmopolitan Society (2022, co-written with Afghan-German tutorial Moshtari Hilal), through which they argue that many German artwork establishments are “diversifying their programming by inviting folks from different international locations and different locations, whereas wilfully sidelining racialised communities that exist and work regionally”.

Barely six weeks after Ndikung was introduced as the subsequent HKW director in 2021, the day by day newspaper Die Welt revealed an article through which he was accused of sympathising with efforts to boycott Israel with the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) motion. This got here after a Fb submit he made about Palestine in 2014 through which he wrote: “They’ll pay a millionfold for each drop of blood in GAZA! Palestine shall be free… come rain or shine!”. The controversy culminated within the German Commissioner for Tradition and the Media Claudia Roth intervening, prompting Ndikung to place out a press release distancing himself from BDS.

Although expressing help for BDS isn’t unlawful in Germany, affiliation with the motion, whether or not based or not, may end up in social {and professional} reprisals. When requested to clarify his standpoint on the subject, Ndikung seems extra measured than earlier than: “Coming from the world of tradition and science, I’m towards cultural boycotts. In inventive processes and inventive work, exclusions per se should not my modus operandi. I firmly advocate for seizing any alternative to talk to one another even in probably the most tough conditions! My focus is on making an attempt to construct bridges relatively than destroy them. And for that, we should be in dialogue. It is about understanding and reconciliation, and that is at all times been my focus.”

Ndikung’s appointment presents the thorny query of how one ought to reconcile wider discussions round decolonisation with that of Palestine. “I am additionally in a studying course of, proper? With all humility, it is a step-by-step course of. We should always be taught to not rush to conclusions…There isn’t a a technique, no one has a monopoly over the reality,” he says. With the HKW’s first occasions set for early June, expectations are excessive, and Ndikung is in preventing spirits: “I do assume artwork can shake the muse on which the world is constructed.”