On a bright morning in early June, German lawmakers, Berlin city officials, ambassadors and other dignitaries clustered at the door of a hulking Modernist edifice, waiting for a Vodou priest to conclude a ritual under a tree.
The priest, Jean-Daniel Lafontant, had come from Haiti to help reopen the House of World Cultures, Berlinâs distinguished but dowdy center for non-European arts and ideas. His task was to invoke Papa Legba â guardian of thresholds and crossroads â before the doors opened on a radically reinvented institution.
The House â or H.K.W., as everyone calls it, using its German initials â is an unwieldy beast, an anachronism with promise. It has prestige and generous state funding. It has space: a 1957 congress hall with a concrete plaza and a dramatic curved roof. (The building was an American gift to West Berlin during the Cold War.)
But its mission has been ambiguous, down to the name, with its whiff of Worldâs Fair pavilions. Founded in 1989 at the dawn of multiculturalism, and just months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, H.K.W. has yawed between programs that highlight foreignness â for instance one-country exhibitions, or âworldâ music and films â and more complex fare.
In recent years, with debates in Germany over migration, Israel-Palestine policy and the rise of the far right oozing into the culture sphere, H.K.W. seemed hunched in an academic stance, aiming, per its now-archived former website, to âinitiate reflection processes and devise new frames of reference.â
To inject new dynamism, the government made an atypical choice for a state-run institution. Since January, it has been led by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, a former microbiologist from Cameroon, who emerged as a curator, critic and charismatic figure on Berlinâs alternative art scene.
Ndikung, who became a German citizen in 2006, is H.K.W.âs first nonwhite director. The institution had never had a non-European staff curator until his ultra-diverse new team arrived. Their first move was to close H.K.W. for four months â for maintenance, but really for much more: a total overhaul of its programs and spirit.
Since reopening, H.K.W. has run at a manic pace. It held a weekend-long festival around the spirit of the Haitian Revolution, and another on artificial intelligence and ancestral knowledge. Talks and films have delved into topics like queer performance and Berlinâs Black history. The grounds throb with concerts and D.J. sets.
On view throughout the building is âO Quilombismo,â a 68-artist exhibition inspired by the quilombos, self-governed communities founded by freed and escaped enslaved people in Brazil. Many works in the show (which runs through Sept. 17) are new commissions â more evidence that Ndikungâs H.K.W. is investing serious funds.
You might say that Ndikung came out swinging, but he rejects the combat metaphor. âLove has everything to do with it,â he said in an interview in July. âHow can we build society with love as a foundation? Thatâs really the project that we are trying to do here.â
The early returns are positive. H.K.W. is reporting record visitor numbers. The artist Temitayo Ogunbiyi, who built a child-friendly outdoor installation for the exhibition, called the reopening festivities, full of families of all backgrounds, the most joyous sheâs witnessed.
Revving H.K.W. up is no small feat, even with a strong program. The building sits in a vortex of state power next to the Chancellorâs office and near Germanyâs Parliament. The security presence can feel forbidding. âWhenever I pass, despite the fact that Iâm the director of this institution, I have to look left and right,â Ndikung said. âThatâs the truth of it.â
Ndikung said he felt no draw to H.K.W. when he arrived in Berlin as a student in the mid-1990s. After entering the arts world, he respected the institutionâs seriousness, but rankled at its mind-set. âI was very critical of the House,â Ndikung said. âI wrote critical texts on the âotheringâ that I thought happened here.â
But, he said, he applied for the job when the opening was announced in 2021 because âwe canât always be on the other side complaining that institutions should change.â
Ndikung trained as a scientist, but grew up around writers in YaoundĂ©, Cameroonâs capital, and Bamenda, the main city of its English-speaking western region. His parentsâ circle included professors, playwrights and poets. At the University of YaoundĂ©, he avoided classes, preferring to hang around musicians and artists.
He also studied German at the YaoundĂ© branch of the Goethe-Institut, following a friendâs lead. His mother sent potatoes from Bamenda to sell and pay the fees. When he qualified for a visa to Germany, his family mortgaged their house to support his travel. âOne day Iâll write a book about my odd jobs,â he said of the work he took in construction, restaurants and more to repay them from Berlin.
Ndikungâs academic path pointed toward a brilliant career in life sciences: a biotechnology degree in Berlin, a doctorate in DĂŒsseldorf, and postdocs in Berlin and Montpellier, France. Before he wrote seriously about art, he published on mutation mechanisms in chronic myelogenous leukemia.
But his avocation was creeping up on him. He visited Documenta, the prestigious five-yearly exhibition in Kassel, Germany, in 2002, struck that the Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor had organized it. âIt was like some other world,â he said â an appealing one. He began helping art students with write-ups and organizing pop-up exhibitions.
For 10 years, he stopped reading fiction to catch up on art history. âFrom the Renaissance painters to all the movements,â he said, âI always knew I was studying them from my vantage as an African â and seeing what was lacking in those narratives while also learning them.â
In 2009, Ndikung started the art space Savvy Contemporary with a few colleagues, first in a storefront in the immigrant-rich neighborhood of Neukölln. It later moved to Wedding, a district with a strong labor-union history. Savvy became a force, its exhibitions and events linking artists and scholars with local families and neighborhood characters, with an emphasis on conviviality.
Ndikung quit his last science job â at a medical equipment company â when he joined the curatorial team for Documenta 14, in 2017. As a curator and a prolific writer and critic, he has become a familiar presence on the global art circuit. Those credentials and his academic status â he is âHerr Professor Doktor Ndikung,â even if his qualifications are not in the arts â check the official boxes to lead H.K.W.
But his success at Savvy was a crucial factor, said Andreas Görgen, the secretary general of Germanyâs culture ministry. âHe has proven that he is able to steer a house as a community focal point,â Görgen said of Ndikung. âNow we are asking him to take these skills and support the community building of Germany as an immigrant society.â
Ndikungâs new role lands him in Germanyâs political battles, as Claudia Roth, the culture minister, made clear in an effusive but pointed speech at H.K.W.âs reopening. She thanked him warmly for choosing to become German, then pivoted, noting that this made him part of a âTĂ€ternationâ â a nation of perpetrators, referring to guilt for Nazism and the Holocaust.
After lauding âintersectional solidarity,â she cautioned that the B.D.S. movement to boycott, divest and sanction Israel over Palestinian occupation â a campaign that Germanyâs Parliament designates as antisemitic â would not be tolerated.
Ndikung has heard it before. After his nomination by Rothâs predecessor, Monika GrĂŒtters, in 2021, the newspaper Die Welt accused him of B.D.S. sympathies. Detractors pointed to a 2014 Facebook post in which he said Israel would âpay a millionfoldâ for its bombings of Gaza. Ndikung has repeated that he does not support B.D.S.; Roth, in office by then, supported him.
The bigger context is the current state of German âmemory culture,â in which accusations of antisemitism are routinely levied against critics of Israeli policy (even Jewish ones), resulting in a series of event cancellations and withdrawn invitations for Palestinian thinkers from German institutions.
Last year, the appearance of an antisemitic image within a mural-like work by an Indonesian collective at Documenta 15 led to the resignation of the exhibitionâs director. As H.K.W. director, Ndikung knows that critics await any slip-up.
But he also wants to lift the debate from its bog. âThe real antisemites in this country, and xenophobes and anti-Muslims,â he said, âare gathering forces.â He pointed to recent polls that showed support for the far-right Alternative for Germany party at more than 20 percent. âThis is what we should focus on,â he said.
At H.K.W., Ndikung has launched a discussion series on memory politics in Germany and Europe, hosted by the Jewish writer Max Czollek. âMemory culture is fundamental,â Ndikung said. âThe question is how to deal with it in a productive way.â
His overhaul of the institution includes another kind of commemoration. It has named every space for a woman in the arts or social movements, with explanatory placards. You might come in through the Nawal El Saadawi Entrance, cross the Sylvia Wynter Foyer, or ascend the Gloria AnzaldĂșa Stairs. The congress hall is now the Miriam Makeba Auditorium.
Like the Vodou ritual at the reopening, renaming the spaces is ceremonial and symbolic. In his opening speech, Ndikung spoke of âinviting other spiritsâ and âreinhabitingâ the institution, of finding peaceful coexistence with all âanimate and inanimate beings.â
Itâs a different energy for a German public institution â not necessarily in sync with its counterparts â but Ndikung isnât worried about that. âWe want to build a different world,â he said. âWe want to think of the world differently,â he added, âand every step matters. Every drop of water matters. And even if youâre coming with a teaspoon, thatâs fine.â
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