Talks
Nkule Mabaso
Revisiting: Looking After Freedom
24 January 2025, 6pm
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This talk will reflect on the exhibition Looking After Freedom, which explored the transformative potential of contemporary Africana art in constructing new frameworks for freedom. Featuring works by ten South African artists, the exhibition condensed a speculative proposition: that “looking after freedom” is an ongoing, imaginative process, not a fixed destination. By framing art as a “present delivered to the future,” the exhbition underscored the generative power of contemporary art to inspire new possibilities for liberation and human connection. The participating artists presented pathways to disentangle colonial legacies, decolonize perspectives, and envision emancipatory futures.
Starting with this question “what were the conditions that made such a project necessary?”, this reflection invites a consideration of art as both a tool and a process for fostering freedom in an ever-evolving global context.
Nkule Mabaso is artist and curator. Currently Mabaso is director of the Fotogalleriet (Oslo), a publicly funded institution / kunsthalle for photography in the Nordic region. Concurrently, Mabaso is Ph.D. researcher at the HDK-Valand Academy of Art & Design, Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Previously she was the Curator at the Michaelis Galleries at the University of Cape Town. Recent notable projects include the curation of the South Africa Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2019, Venice together with Nomusa Makhubu under the title “The stronger we become”. Mabaso’s practice is collaborative and research interests centre around theorising and articulating nuanced aesthetic questions from the black female vantage point.