Curatorial Team - SAVAH 2026

Viwe Madinda is a South African multidisciplinary artist based in the city of Makhanda. She graduated with a BFA (with distinction) and an MFA from the Fine Art Department at Rhodes University where she participated in the NRF SARChI programme in the arts of Africa.

In 2023 she co-curated the exhibition, My Name Will Be Mine One Day, at the RAW SPOT gallery, featuring the work of Makhanda-based artist Nompumelelo Edith Bukani. In Her practice-based research I, Madinda is interested in the synergy of performance and photography together with sound, mixed media, and installation. Her art practice is inspired by her love for her Xhosa heritage and language, so she utilizes her creative concepts to explore cultural knowledge systems that speak to the topic of identity.

Madinda’s work engages with the concept of post-colonial identity, and she draws most of her material from her own memory of lived experiences. She used these experiences to unpack the meaning of growing up as Black African woman living in post-apartheid South Africa. A recurring theme in her artwork the impact of identity on mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being.

Trained in fine art and textile design, Mpumzi Mpati works as a technical and production practitioner in the Department of Fine Art at Rhodes University. Over the past decade he has worked behind the scenes of many exhibitions and events, providing the technical, audiovisual and production support that helps artists and students take their work from idea to realisation.

He has worked alongside visiting and resident artists in the department to produce and print their work, among them Senzo Shabangu (National Research Foundation artist in residence) and Lucas Bambo (Arts Festival artist in residence).

His work includes gallery installation and event production, and he was instrumental in Rhodes University's RU120 exhibition.

Mpati has also supported exhibitions connected with the NRF SARChI Chair in Geopolitics and the Arts of Africa,
including RAW artists in residence and the Arts Lounge Africa programme.

As a creative, Mpati is interested in how technology can present art, history and culture in more immersive and accessible ways. Mpati also exhibits his own artwork and participated in Ukuza kukaNxele (The Return of Makhanda) at the Albany History Museum.

Motlalepula Phukubje is currently an MFA student with the NRF SARChI programme in the arts of Africa at Rhodes University.
She is a curator with a background in archival research, holding three degrees in Politics, African Studies, and History.

She is a graduate of both the University of Cape Town and the University of the Western Cape, and her curatorial practice revolves around the concept of nurturing Africa's Creative Consciousness.

She engages with untold histories through various mediums such as written and oral narratives, photography, video, exhibition making, and performance art to challenge the conventional norms of exhibition spaces. She showcases artists whose work transcends traditional categorizations, often defying the confines of the white cube.

Believing in using diverse creative methods to instigate spaces for emancipatory practices, Motlalepula's research and curatorial practice encourage African and diasporic imaginations to envision a world beyond the current reality. Central to her approach is a deep-seated belief in the alignment of African indigenous practices with African bodies and the earth, emphasizing sustainability and life-affirming values.

Through her curation, Motlalepula aims to spotlight artists whose work resonates with the spirit, energy, vibrations, and consciousness of addressing social issues embedded within their artistic expression."

Sange Mpambani is a Black queer performance artist, theatre performer, arts writer, and emerging curator from Khayelitsha, Cape Town. He holds a BA degree and Honours degree in Art History (both with distinction) from Rhodes University, South Africa.

In 2025 he received a curatorial fellowship at the Centre for Curating the Archive at UCT where he worked on vernacular photography and performance art with sensibilities in Black Queer Township life.

He is currently pursuing an MFA degree in curating with the NRF SARChl chair programme in Geopolitics and the Arts of Africa.

His research is on invisible performances of the everyday in public spaces, migration, social protests, art interventionism, feminist, and queer theory. As a performance artist, Sange’s work takes a queer and decolonial approach to performance-making that is concerned with deconstructing and rethinking public spaces pulsating with remnants of colonial legacy, and race-based segregation in post-apartheid South Africa.

Engaging with public spaces, Sange utilises queer aesthetics to imagine a queer utopia in spaces
marked by colonial and apartheid narratives.

As an emerging curator, He co-curated a multimedia exhibition titled Siphethe Iinyembezi Ezeminyaka (2023), and as a theatre performer, he has performed in the National Arts Festival Buyani (2022) written and directed by Siyabulela Javu, Breaking the Curse choreographed by Acty Tang. Queering Landscape (2023) and WE ARE EVERYHWERE (2024) A body of work consisting of public art interventions and Performative Photographs.

Sange mostly works with his soul friend Ezona Njokweni on performance works, photographic works, curating, and writing.

Ruth Simbao is an author, professor, curator, photographer and filmmaker. She is currently the National Research Foundation SARChI Chair in Geopolitics and the Arts of Africa and a Professor in the Fine Art Department at Rhodes University, South Africa.

She is also a core researcher in the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence, which is a Rhodes collaboration with the University of Lagos (Nigeria), Moi University (Kenya), Joseph Ki-Zerbo University (Burkina Faso), and Bayreuth University (Germany). Simbao founded the RAW Spot Gallery in 2018, the pan-African PROSPA Publishing Workshops in 2016, and Arts Lounge Africa in 2011.She received her PhD from the History of Art and Architecture Department at Harvard University (2008) and was an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Postdoctoral Fellow as part of the Humanities in Africa programme (2010).Simbao was the recipient of the Vice-Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award at Rhodes University (2009) and received a Harvard University Teaching Award as a Teaching Fellow (2002).

Focusing on the arts of Africa, her research interests include art, activism and social justice; Africa–China and the arts; the intimacies and resistances of Afro-Asian entanglements; ‘strategic southernness’ and global souths; theories of ‘place’ (including contra-flow diasporas and ‘cosmolocalism’); the power of modesty, small spaces and ‘failures’; artists’ responses to Afrophobia; and an alter-geopolitics of knowledge.Her most recent research as a scholar and a creative has been on transoceanic studies and St. Helena Island in the South Atlantic, and somatic relationships between land, burial sites and spirits.

Simbao serves on the Editorial Board of the book series, Afrasia: Contours, Crossings, Connections (Pittsburg University Press), and founded the only Africa-based board for the African Arts journal (MIT Press) consortium (2016 to 2021). Having published in various academic journals (Art Journal, Safundi, African Arts, NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Renjian Thought Review, Something We Africans Got, Critical Interventions, Third Text, Image & Text, Art South Africa, and Parachute: Revue d’Art Contemporain/Contemporary Art), her current focus is on book publishing and film creation.

She is the lead editor of Audacious Art Histories, Grounding the Arts of Africa (in press) and co-editor of Visualising China in Southern Africa: Biography, Circulation, Transgression (2022).

Simbao is currently writing a monograph (Intimacy, Solidarity, Resistance: Art and Visual Culture at the Africa-China Nexus), and creating two feature documentary films set in Zambia and on St. Helena Island.