Pauline Buhlebenkosi Ndhlovu is one of our 2024-2025 Art Writing Fellowship Recipients

The ARAK Collection is thrilled to announce that Pauline Buhlebenkosi Ndhlovu is one of the recipients of our Art Writing Fellowships for 2024-2025.

Ndhlovu is a visual anthropologist, curator, editor and writer, who lives in Windhoek, Namibia. Her work focuses primarily on exploring the interconnected affective registers associated with sensory experience. Through her writing and occasional image-making, she explores how words, images, sounds and silences articulate different kinds of knowledge. Thematically, Ndhlovu’s work explores black representation and black interiority, focusing specifically on the ways land, migration, memory, healing and time cut across.

In November 2022, she participated in the Invisible Borders ‘Whispers from the Wilderness’ Trans-African road trip around the Okavango Delta. Throughout the border crossings between Botswana and Namibia, she took the time to consider the onboarding of the senses she experienced for the duration of the trip.

She is the winner of the inaugural Bank Windhoek Doek! Literary Awards Poetry Prize. In 2022, as a Chevening Scholar, she obtained a Master’s in Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester. Ndhlovu recently completed the Zeitz MOCAA & University of the Western Cape Museum (UWC) Fellowship, where she learnt about curatorial practice, collections management, and contemporary scholarship on art discourse from the continent and its diaspora. She is currently the editor of Waithood Magazine.

Ndhlovu’s current focus for the ARAK Fellowship is on the Namibian art scene, and has seen her engaging with the work of various Namibian artists in the ARAK Collection.

We look forward to Ndhlovu’s further engagement with the collection and her subsequent reflections and outputs. 

About the ARAK Collection Art Writing Fellowship programme:

Our Art Writing & Publishing programme targets interested Art Writers, Academics, Critics, and Intellectuals who have a publication project they would like to collaborate on or develop with the ARAK Collection.

The Fellowship Programme was created to support the ARAK Collection’s Mission of developing and supporting young and mid-career artists, curators and writers through promoting curatorial research, publications and exhibitions of the Collection’s works. The exhibitions, developed and produced by the ARAK Collection, aspire to be impactful on a global scale and are all associated with relevant public programming.

About the ARAK Collection:

The ARAK Collection is an independent, Qatari-based initiative that aims to promote, through exhibitions, publications, research and educational programs, Contemporary African Art and Artists.

The collection is a resource for Artists, Curators and Researchers. It presents travelling exhibitions, lends artwork to regional and international organisations, institutions and museums, and produces print and online publications, and impactful public programs associated with the exhibitions it produces and hosts. The ARAK Collection is a public platform to foster critical dialogue around contemporary art practices with a focus on African Artists and educational programmes that have an educational and developmental impact on the local community.

The collection consists of paintings, works on paper, and prints from more than 300 young and mid-career artists from African countries.

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