An Ongoing-Offcoming Tale comprises abstractions, subversions and poetic ruminations, housed within essays that engage with the lives and practices of over 30 artists.
The book opens with the question: If only some leaves could speak? And in the journey that follows, we encounter many such possibilities—that leave us asking questions of the boundaries we place around the things we are allowed to think, the knowledge we call knowledge, and the questions we permit ourselves to ask. The book is an exercise in learning to reimagine: bodies, land, knowledge, memory, song. Ndikung allows us to step into the visions and the lived forms of knowledge that inform his curatorial practice.
As we collectively emerge from a stillness that made it impossible to look away from the harm caused by social infrastructures we once deemed necessary, these essays are more urgent than ever. They give us tools to think with about the 'contemporary' in meaningful ways, enabling us to ask important questions of culture and power.
Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (born 1977 in Yaoundé, Cameroon, lives and
works in Berlin) is a curator, art critic, author and
biotechnologist. He is founder of SAVVY Contemporary
Berlin and of SAVVY Journal for critical texts
on contemporary African
art. He was associate professor at Muthesius University Kiel, and guest professor in curatorial studies at the Städelschule in
Frankfurt. He was curator-at-large for documenta 14, and was a guest
curator of the 2018 Dak'Art Biennale in Senegal. As part of the Miracle
Workers Collective, he curated the Finnish Pavilion at the Venice
Biennale in 2019. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung is the director of Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin since 2023.
