Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung will curate the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, slated to take place in the second half of 2025.
Born in Yaoundé, Cameroon, Ndikung is a curator, author and biotechnologist. Currently Ndikung serves as the director and chief curator of Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), a role he has started earlier this January. Previously he was the founding artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin and the director of sonsbeek20->24 in the Netherlands as well as two editions of Bamako Encounters – African Biennale of Photography in Mali. Ndikung received his PhD in Medical Biotechnology from Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf/TU Berlin and a postdoc in biophysics from Université de Montpellier, France.
‘With its pathbreaking exhibitions, public and pedagogical programs, the Bienal de São Paulo has succeeded in bringing art to varying communities and demographic groups,’ Ndikung said in a statement. ‘Despite the challenges that biennials are facing around the world, they still serve as important barometers for measuring the sociopolitical pressures of the world. The Bienal de São Paulo seems to me to be a seismograph that not only records the different tremblements the world is experiencing socioeconomically, geopolitically and environmentally, but these records also give us the possibilities of shaping a more just, humanitarian future for all animate and inanimate beings on this planet.’
