weissensee school of art and design berlin announces the appointment of curator, Prof. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, PhD and artist, Prof. Nasan Tur, as new professors of the internationally oriented post-graduate program Spatial Strategies. With the commencement of their tenure, the Spatial Strategies MA program will also chart a new trajectory that critically deliberates on the vulnerabilities of spaces, especially through migrant and pluricultural perspectives.

In this light, the Spatial Strategies MA program will also accommodate reflections on the impact of coloniality and the multiple resistances thereof on spaces of the coloniser and colonised, and how the rhythms of physical and virtual spaces, rural and urban spaces, the local and the global are marked by such sociopolitical realities—in the past and the contemporary. In times when we observe an upsurge of racist and xenophobic attacks in many societies and violences in relation to creed, gender and sexuality in both virtual and physical spaces, in times of increased radicalization of concepts of nationhood and a massive shift to the extreme right, Spatial Strategies must also ask the question of how do certain bodies navigate certain spaces in certain geographies and at certain times. Cognisant of the current situation of a world pandemic, how do we think of space in times of social distancing, quarantinisation, self-isolation and an eminent virtualisation of life in the face of and in the aftermath of a pandemic.The Spatial Strategies MA program will tackle these issues from an artistic, curatorial as well as critical theory perspectives.

It is within these frequencies that students from varying disciplines are invited to apply for the post-graduate program Spatial Strategies. The approximately 40 graduate students selected for this program will be encouraged to redefine and challenge preconceptions of private and public spaces, virtual and physical spaces, political and non-political spaces using artistic and curatorial tools. Students will also be encouraged to work around and within sonic spaces as alternative spaces of navigation that re-situate the notion of physicality of space, as sound, though invisible, produces and marks spaces through waves.

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, PhD, is an independent curator, art critic, author and biotechnologist. He is the founder and artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary Berlin. He was curator-at-large for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, and guest curator of the 2018 Dak’Art Biennale in Senegal. Together with the Miracle Workers Collective he curated the Finland Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019. In 2002 he curated the 12th edition of Bamako Encounters in Mali and will be the artistic director of the upcoming Sonsbeek exhibition.

Nasan Tur lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He was born in 1974  in Offenbach ( Germany). He studied at Academy of Art and Design Offenbach and the Academy of Art Städelschule Frankfurt. 

Find out more about the application process here.