Cape Town-based curator, artist and sociologist Khanyisile Mbongwa has been announced as the organizer of the Twelfth Liverpool Biennial, to take place from June to September 2023. Mbongwa, who most recently served as chief curator for the Stellenbosch Triennale 2020 in South Africa defines her curatorial practice as “Curing & Care, using the creative to instigate spaces for emancipatory practices, joy and play.”
Of Mbongwa’s appointment, Liverpool Biennial director Sam Lackey said in a statement, “Her long standing curatorial concerns around care and repair will be vital in thinking about new futures together with the city.”
Mbongwa is the curator of Puncture Points, founding member and curator of Twenty Journey and former Executive Director of Handspring Trust Puppets. She is one of the founding members of arts collective Gugulective, Vasiki Creative Citizens and WOC poetry collective Rioters In Session. Mbongwa was a Mellon Foundation Fellow at the Institute of Creative Arts at the University of Cape Town, where she completed her masters in Interdisciplinary Arts, Public Art and the Public Sphere, and has worked locally and internationally. She is also currently a PhD candidate at UCT where her work focuses on spatiality, radical black self love and imagination, and black futurity.
Mbongwa said in a statement: “I am looking forward to co-creating with individuals, collectives and organisations both within Liverpool and beyond and am interested to see how the city has established itself historically, how it sustains itself in this moment and how it imagines its future.”