Sven Christian is a writer, editor, and curator. In early 2022, he was appointed curator of NIROX Sculpture Park and the Villa-Legodi Centre for Sculpture (currently under construction at NIROX). He completed an MA in Contemporary Curatorial Practices at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2020, published in part by The Garage Journal. The associated curatorial project, ‘You wouldn’t know God if he spat in your eye’: impressions from Dumile Feni’s scroll, was published online by Ellipses: Journal of Creative Research in 2020. Recent exhibitions include Noria Mabasa: Shaping Dreams (2022), and Afropolitanism (2022) — co-curated with fellow ICI alumni Obed Mokhuhlani. Sven is also the editor of Ashraf Jamal’s most recent book, Strange Cargo: Essays on Art (2022), Coral Bijoux’s Dreams as R-evolution (2020), and William Kentridge’s Why Should I Hesitate: Putting Drawings to Work (2019). Between 2017 and 2018 Sven was an Assistant Curator at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA). During this time he assisted with the museum’s opening exhibitions, managed the production of Edson Chagas’ Luanda, Encyclopaedic City (curated by Paula Nascimento and Stefano Rabolli Pansera), and was the organising curator of Publishing Against the Grain, a travelling exhibition conceived and produced by ICI, New York, which opened at Zeitz MOCAA in November 2017 before travelling to CCA, Lagos. Between 2015 and 2017 he was the assistant editor at ART AFRICA magazine. Prior to that he founded Ism- Skism, an artist-led initiative that encouraged participants to produce work in the public domain.
