About

Nkule Mabaso is a curator, researcher, and institution builder. She is Director of Natal Collective (2012-), an independent production company active internationally in the research and presentation of contemporary art and politics.

She is a doctoral researcher at HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design, University of Gothenburg, where her dissertation — Pan-African Feminist Ecological Creative Imaginaries — researches artistic and curatorial practices situated at the intersection of art, ecology, and African feminism. She is a member of Ecologies of Care, an international feminist research collective based at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and a researcher within the AWARE Common Ground: Feminist and Decolonial Ecologies programme at Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Her curatorial work includes the co-curation of the South African Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019, The Stronger We Become, with Nomusa Makhubu); the Winnie Madikizela Mandela Brandfort House Interpretive Centre (DSAC, 2022); the Gallery of Leaders at Freedom Park Museum, Pretoria (2025); and the programme at Fotogalleriet addressing photography as a critical art practice through feminist, decolonial, and ecological frameworks 2024-2026.

Her editorial credits include Climate: Our Right to Breathe (K Verlag / L’Internationale, 2022), The Climate Reader: Propositions, Poetics, Operations (co-edited with Nick Aikens, L’Internationale Online, 2026), and co-editing three issues of OnCurating journal, including issue 49, Decolonial Propositions (with Jyoti Mistry). She holds a BA Fine Arts from the University of Cape Town (2011) and an MAS in Curating from the Zurich University of the Arts (2014).

Mabaso’s practice is guided by the conviction that institutions are living, responsive organisms — that decolonisation is not a mythical endeavour but a politics of recognition.