When Ndikung arrived as director of Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in January, he promptly closed the museum for four months. It was ostensibly for maintenance, but it signalled too that a new broom was coming. On reopening, every space had been renamed after women in arts or social movements, and a new curatorial team was in place. The latter included Senegalese curator Marie Hélène Pereira, Colombian artist Carlos Maria Romero, Filipina activist Rosa Cordillera A. Castillo, Cameroonian curator Dzekashu MacViban and Turkish-born curator Can Sungu. Their opening programme was reflective of that multiculturalism: a 68-artist exhibition inspired by the quilombos, communities founded by formerly enslaved people in Brazil; a festival centring on the Haitian Revolution; and another concerning AI and ancestral knowledge. Long used to running his own show, at Berlin’s Savvy Contemporary for 13 years and as artistic director of the troubled Sonsbeek 20–24 exhibition in Arnhem, among other projects, Ndikung knows he is now part of the establishment and will have a tricky line to run.