When two southerners meet: A Performative conversation between Nkule Mabaso and Ram Krishna Ranjan
This conversation navigates the tensions, contradictions and common ground on the question of justice and violence read through the respective practices of two PhD candidates at HDK-Valand. Their work is rooted in the geographical specificities of South Africa and India and explores the theme of Violence, emanating from the ‘contact points’ of their situatedness which resists immediate ‘common ground’ and yet functions as an intervention in how common rhetorical strategies around creative regimes are engaged in the formulation of aesthetic experiences.
Schedule
Day 1 - Friday19 Nov 2021
10.00-11.00
When two southerners meet: A Performative conversation between Nkule Mabaso and Ram Krishna Ranjan
Ram Krishna RanjanNkule Mabaso
Location: online
Contributors
Nkule Mabaso
Nkule Mabaso is the director of Natal Collective an independent production company active internationally in the research and presentation of creative and cultural Africana contemporary art and politics. Forthcoming projects include producing the Gallery of Leaders exhibition for the Freedom Park Museum, Pretoria. Other recent projects include the curation, together with Nomusa Makhubu, of the South Africa Pavilion at the Venice Biennale Arte 2019 under the title The stronger we become. Nkule graduated with a Fine Arts degree from the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 2011 and received a Masters in Curating from the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) in 2014. She is the former curator of the Michaelis Galleries at University of Cape Town (2015-2021). She has curated and organised exhibitions and public talks in Switzerland, Malawi, Tanzania, the Netherlands and South Africa. Nkule voluntarily serves on the advisory boards of VANSA, the Standard Bank Art Gallery in Johannesburg, The University of Cape Town Works of Art Committee, the Museum Services Board of the Western Cape Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport and is contributing editor to the Oncurating.org Journal at the ZHdK; an issue entitled “Decolonial Propositions”, edited together with Jyoti Mistry is forthcoming (April 2021). Nkule’s practice is collaborative with her research interests centering around theorizing and articulating nuanced aesthetic questions from the black female vantage point and she has made significant strides in national and international curatorial projects and has contributed to a number of prominent research publications on the subject.
Ram Krishna Ranjan (born 1985, India) is a practice-based researcher and visual artist and is currently doing his PhD in Artistic Research at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg. He works at the intersection of research, pedagogy and film practice. His educational background is in Economics, Media and Cultural Studies and Fine Art. His longstanding areas of interests are decolonial and postcolonial practices and the intersectionality of caste, class, and gender. Through his moving-images based practice, he tries to build conversations around place-specific issues of social, economic and political justice.