Curatorial Residency

Curating in democratic crisis

“…for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures…” - A Litany for Survival, Audre Lorde

I am often missing my friends in Kampala because of how much they understand my sense of humor. There is no situation that warrants enough seriousness for a Ugandan to resist making a joke. Everything is material. While this is sometimes frustrating in the face of relentless mundane political tyranny over the last forty years, it is also a way to acknowledge that we are still making lives despite the men in uniforms everywhere. In that sense no fatality is fatal. Even when it is. Even when it lurks right outside your door. I, very reluctantly, admit to this Ugandan-ism in the face of so much tragedy, some personal, others on a scale that does the world in — I laugh a lot, I dance a lot. As Lorde says, I value myself more than I value my terrors.

[I am resisting the urge to cite June Jordan’s essay Some of Us Did Not Die here, but imagine that I have.] These are important prefaces from my corner of the world in thinking through what it means to curate in times of democratic crisis.
I begin with a song:scream in Abderrahmane Sissako’s 2006 film Bamako. In the courtroom drama that sits strangely neatly between documentary and fiction, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are placed on trial in a domestic courtyard in Bamako. At the start of the film an old griot comes to give his testimony but is turned away. The life in the city continues—people fall in love, fight, get married, somebody dies, there’s a funeral procession—all happening as we get testimonies of how imperialism has deliberately impoverished Africa. At the end of the film, when the griot returns he sings (or screams) and it is not intellectually coherent in the ways that the testimonies were but one gets the sense that this, this guttural release is what it all comes down to.

Sissako captures a quotidian sensibility of living through crises on macro and micro levels. As opposed to focusing on a singular event, Bamako takes seriously the historical context of how the crisis is produced. He notes in a 2007 interview that while a true trial against these institutions is improbable, fiction makes some semblance of it possible. Bamako asks us to imagine a political condition in which the crisis is the environment, in which the courtroom is inside life. I imagine the film in the same lineage as Marxist scholar Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972). Both argue that colonialism produced political and economic arrangements in which European prosperity and political stability were partly constituted through the political disruption, disintegration and dispossession of Africa. Rodney:

“European workers have paid a great price for the few material benefits which accrued to them as crumbs from the colonial table. The class in power controls the dissemination of information. The capitalists misinformed and miseducated workers in the metropoles to the point where they became allies in colonial exploitation. In accepting to be led like sheep, European workers were perpetuating their own enslavement to the capitalists. They ceased to seek political power and contented themselves with bargaining for small wage increases, which were usually counterbalanced by increased costs of living. They ceased to be creative and allowed bourgeois cultural decadence to overtake them all. They failed to exercise any independent judgement on the great issues of war and peace, and therefore ended up by slaughtering not only colonial peoples but also themselves”

The contemporary European language of “democratic crisis” tends to be activated when familiar institutions begin to malfunction from within: the rise of the AfD, Meloni, Trump, attacks on liberal institutions, restrictions on migration, the weakening of public media, etc. What this panic in 2026 fails to acknowledge is the longue duree of Western Europe’s plunder of the Global Majority. What Europe currently calls a crisis is, from the perspective of much of the colonised world, simply the return of a political condition it has long exported. Perhaps the question is not whether democracy is in crisis (because it has been for the last century), but rather whose crisis is being addressed in the present moment.
Democracy, at least in its liberal institutional form, is premised upon the possibility of a collective subject: a people who can be counted, represented and granted rights within a determinate political order. Its mechanisms depend upon procedures for producing agreement, managing disagreement and legitimising decisions—elections, representation, deliberation, law. But these procedures also require that the boundaries of the political community have already been established: that there is a recognisable “we” entitled to participate, a territory within which that participation is organised, and a set of institutions authorised to mediate difference. The democratic crisis therefore cannot be reduced to the failure of these institutions. It also concerns the historical and material conditions through which some subjects have been constituted as belonging to the political community while others have been rendered external to it, or included only on unequal terms.

Christina Sharpe’s Lose Your Kin offers a way to trouble the presumed universality of the democratic subject. Written in the aftermath of Trump’s election in 2016, she asks white Americans to refuse reconciliation with white supremacist kinship structures. She connects contemporary political belonging to the historical formation of kinship through slavery: who counts as family, who counts as property, and who is excluded from the political and familial “we.”

The question, then, is not simply who is included within democracy, but through what exclusions the category of democratic belonging becomes intelligible in the first place. Read alongside the afterlives of slavery and colonialism, kinship cannot be separated from the production of racial, national and economic orders that determine whose vulnerability is recognised and whose is rendered ordinary. In that sense we must acknowledge that the ever-present and ongoing colonial situation is always already antithetical to democracy.

What implications does this have for curatorial practice, which operates on a different scale?

Literary scholar Tadiwa Madenga has, in her work and in conversation with my dear co-conspirator Rosie Olang’ Odhiambo, made propositions for what she calls ‘African queer curatorship’. Part of this work has involved studying the curatorial practice of Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera (1964-2005). One of the exhibitions Vera curated at National Gallery of Bulawayo in 1997 was titled Zimbabwean Heritage. This exhibition included the work of lesbian painter Bulelwa Madekurozwa. As Madenga notes in her zine Vera’s Gallery: A Genealogy of African Queer Curatorship (2026), “Vera not only featured Madekurozwa's painting “Gay Policeman” in her exhibition Zimbabwean Heritage (1997) but as the catalogue cover.” This very deliberate curatorial decision was underwriting a conception of the Zimbabwean citizen. (I have written elsewhere about this).

Regardless, Vera still hesitated to show this painting to President Mugabe when he visited the exhibition. What I am getting at is that curating cannot necessarily, and should not pretend to, resolve the contradictions of democratic representation. Its possibilities are more provisional, speculative and materially modest. Indeed, modest is not nothing. It is important that there are other ways to construct relations between people, objects, histories, images and forms of knowledge. There is political potential in the unlikely alliances and collectivisms that create interferences in the field of crisis we find ourselves deeply embedded in. That potential is perhaps in figuring out how to sustain those unexpected encounters. The curatorial, at its most consequential, is a site of political prefiguration, a prophetic space for calling things that are not as though they were.

June Jordan ends that essay with a poem Scenario Revision #1 which I return to often. In lieu of quoting it in its entirety, some questions for the imaginary:real “we” interested in freedom dreams:

what is the frontier we are pushing:moving into? // how shall we move there? // do we need to move there? // is the movement inevitable? // does inevitable necessarily mean acceptable? // voluntary? // what are we volunteering our lives to? // how are we giving over into the unacceptable inevitable? // how are we resisting the unacceptable inevitable? // again, what is the frontier we are pushing:moving into? // if it is voluntary and acceptable but not inevitable how do we make it so? // how are we making it so?