Gabi Ngcobo is the current Director of Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam, NL. Between 2020 and 2023 she was Curatorial Director at the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria (Javett-UP), where she organised the group exhibitions Handle with Care (2021) and SCENORAMA (2022). Gabi was critical in positioning the Art Centre as a “living academy;” she initiated collective learning spaces in dialogue with works from loaned collections and brought to South Africa Frequencies, a project by Oscar Murillo. She worked on new commissions supported by the Hartwig Art Foundation (NL) with artists Nolan Oswald Dennis and Luana Vitra. In 2022 Gabi curated The Show is Over at the South London Gallery and co-curated (with Murillo) The ‘t’ is Silent at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenes in Deurle, Belgium. Since the beginning of her curatorial career, Gabi has worked on independent curatorial projects, collaborated with various institutions in different parts of the world and for eight years lectured in the art department of the Wits School of Arts in Johannesburg. In 2018 she curated the 10th Berlin Biennale titled We Don’t Need Another Hero and was one of the co-curators of the 32nd Sao Paulo Bienal titled Incenteza Viva (2016). She is a founding member of the Johannesburg based collaborative platforms NGO – Nothing Gets Organised (2016-) and the Center for Historical Reenactments (2010–14).
Gabi was part of the Founding Commission that selected the Indonesian collective, Ruangrupa, to curate documenta 15 in 2022. She has sat on numerous jury committees, including Future Generations Art Prize 2021, Artes Mundi 2023 and Berlin Biennale 2022.
Her writings have been published in various publications including Shooting Down Babylon: The Tracey Rose Retrospective at Zeitz MoCCA, Cape Town, (2022), Uneven Bodies, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Aotearoa New Zealand (2021), The Stronger We Become the catalogue of the South African Pavilion, Venice (2019), We Are Many: Art, the Political and Multiple Truths and Texte Zur Kunst September 2017.
