Art Metropole

#15688

Pidginization as Curatorial Method: Messing with Languages and Praxes of Curating

Date

2024

Publisher

Sternberg Press

Format

Artists' Books

Genre

Curating

In this compelling rethinking of curatorial practice, renowned museum director, curator, and writer Dr. 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.”