Curating is not what I do, it is the essence of who I am.
“As they circulate through our lives, we look through objects (to see what they disclose about history, society, nature or culture – above all, what they disclose about us), but we only catch a glimpse of things.” — Brown, Thing Theory, 2001.
Art, music, history, the development of cultures, their legacies, interpretation and its translation via various modes of communication are what I am most passionate about.
At present I am a Chester Dale Fellow (2021/22) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and until December 2021, I functioned as the Acting Chief Curator & Collections Curator for the National Art Gallery of Namibia (NAGN). I served as Executive Member of the Museums Association of Namibia (MAN) and on the Namibia Heritage Council (NHC) Committee for the annual heritage week preparations and celebrations. In 2017, I was elected as International Council of Museums (ICOM) Fellow and in 2016 International Committee for Museums of Ethnography (ICME) Fellow. At present I am a PhD candidate, Fine Art Curatorial Practice, University of Pretoria who currently holds a Master of Arts in Curating Contemporary Design from Kingston University London.
My curatorial practice is stemmed in deepening a sense of pride about history and forging a collective identity for the future. This objective aligns with Aspiration 5 (Africa with a Strong Cultural Identity Common Heritage, Values and Ethics) of the African Union Agenda 2063 and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development which commits all states to be part of a new global compact that will leave no one behind.
My research objective employs platforms for identifying art, architecture and design from the African continent, the diaspora and the cultural associations by leaning on Rebecca Solnit and Lucy Lippards concepts of Mapping and Map-making. I desire to continue mapping the heritage of my continent, its people and the associations to tangible and intangible heritage through an ongoing process of oral history collating. The practice informs identity formations, looking at self-naming and being labeled and coming to terms with self-representation despite the shape shifting identities we are forced to assume.
Colonizing processes cannot be disentangled from the ethnographic practice of defining the local, the native, the marginalized and the under-represented, therefor the African peoples’ pursuit for decolonization cannot be disengaged from reclaiming indigenous histories as vehicles of ideological resistance to colonialism. The continued fragility of postcolonial democracies suggests that the omission of this factor from the larger literature on regime change should be rethought. An imperative is to intentionally explore writings of canonical texts that will become universal epistemologies capable of righting the imperialistic wrongs of the past.