In this compelling rethinking of curatorial practice, renowned museum director, curator, and writer Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung proposes that Pidgin languages and pidginization as a mode of being and doing offer a decolonialized reinvention of communicative practices—a space in which the boundaries between disciplines of knowledge collapse and sociopolitical, economic, ethical, and spiritual concepts and questions are renegotiated.
Written as a series of powerful anecdotes, the book grounds its provocative ideas in personal, cultural, and political histories of challenge and improvisation, and argues, as Ndikung writes, that "pidginized curating is a curating that combines works, ideas, practices, and languages in resistance to canonical conventions, cultural stasis, ossified practices, dead rhythms, and singular forms."
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.
