Farzanah Badsha, South Africa

Guest Curator Farzanah Badsha (ZA) researches and experiments with contemporary South African art of the 1980s from the Weltkulturen Museum’s collection. The results will be presented in an exhibition at the Green Room of the Museum. Badsha is scholarship holder of the “Curators in Residence: Curating Collections” programme of the KfW Stiftung.

Farzanah Badsha (ZA) is an independent curator and arts manager.
From 2012-2013 she was Programme Manager of “Creative Cape Town” at the “Cape Town Partnership”. During her time at “Creative Cape Town” her focus was on the “City Hall and City All Concert” series and policy discussions on public art in the City of Cape Town. Related to this she worked as a member of the curatorial panel and an adviser to the City of Cape Town on the “art54” project, to place temporary public art in Ward 54. From 2008-2010 she was project manager and part of the curatorial team for the “Spier Contemporary 2010” exhibition organised by the Africa Centre. 2006-2008 she worked as the Visual Arts Manager of the Africa Centre. Currently she is a Board member and Secretary of the Africa South Art Initiative (ASAI) and her latest curatorial project before starting her residency was entitled “Shop Front and Centre” where she curated contemporary South African art in empty shop windows along one of the busiest commuter routes in Cape Towns city centre.

Publications: “Old Skool Rules/New Skool Breaks: Negotiating Identities’ in the Cape Town Hip Hop” Scene in “Shifting Selves, Post – Apartheid essays on Mass Media, Culture and Identity”, edited by Herman Wasserman and Sean Jacobs,  2003, Kwela Books, Cape Town. Her final project for the Visual History course at the UWC History Department entitled “Aspects of South African documentary photography in the 1980s” was subsequently used in the reader for this course.

Fellowships awarded: AW Mellon Fellowship for the Master’s Degree in the Department of Historical Studies, UCT. This fellowship included a semester of study at the University of California at Berkeley that was taken up in 2001. AW Mellon Fellowship for Honours Degree in the Faculty of Humanities, 1999.