The Alchemist of Asymmetries: How Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung Is Reimagining the São Paulo Biennial as a Laboratory for Humanity

In the pantheon of contemporary curators who have fundamentally challenged how we conceive of art institutions, few have traveled as unlikely a path as Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung. The journey from a laboratory bench in Berlin, where he once studied the molecular mechanics of life, to the helm of the world's second-oldest biennial reads like a parable about the porousness of disciplines—and the necessity of breaking down the walls between science, art, and society.

When Ndikung arrives in São Paulo to curate the 36th edition of the biennial, he brings with him not just an impressive résumé of international exhibitions but a radical methodology forged in the crucible of creating SAVVY Contemporary, the Berlin art space he founded in 2009 that became a beacon for non-Western perspectives in one of Europe's most cosmopolitan cities. His appointment represents more than a curatorial choice; it signals a fundamental shift in how Latin America's most important art exhibition sees itself in relation to global power structures and local communities.

The title of his biennial, "Not All Travellers Walk Roads—Of Humanity as Practice," drawn from Afro-Brazilian poet Conceição Evaristo's enigmatic verse, immediately establishes the territory Ndikung intends to explore. This is not about the well-trodden paths of international art world circulation, where the same names appear in Venice, Kassel, and New York. Instead, Ndikung proposes to chart the unmarked routes, the desire paths worn by those who move outside official channels, whose journeys—physical, spiritual, epistemological—challenge our understanding of what it means to be human in a world that seems increasingly intent on dividing us into categories.

The three-fragment structure of the exhibition, unfolding across 2025 and into early 2026, represents a deliberate slowing down of biennial time. Where most exhibitions compress their ambitions into a few months of spectacle, Ndikung and his curatorial team—Alya Sebti, Anna Roberta Goetz, Thiago de Paula Souza, Keyna Eleison, and Henriette Gallus—propose something more akin to a sustained conversation, or perhaps more accurately, a collective listening session.

The first fragment invites us to reclaim space and time, to pay attention to what Evaristo calls the "submerged worlds that only the silence of poetry and poetic listening can access." In an art world obsessed with visibility and virality, this call for submersion feels almost countercultural. The second fragment turns to the question of recognition—what do we see when we look at ourselves reflected in the other? The third, still to be fully revealed, promises to explore forms of coexistence that don't rely on the violence of assimilation or the false comfort of tolerance.

What makes Ndikung's approach particularly resonant for São Paulo—a megacity of over 12 million where extreme wealth and poverty exist in uncomfortable proximity—is his understanding of the biennial as what he calls a "seismograph." Not merely recording the tremors of our contemporary moment but actively participating in shaping "a more just, humanitarian future for all animate and inanimate beings on this planet." This expanded notion of who and what counts as a participant in culture reflects the influence of Indigenous cosmologies that have long been present in Brazilian thought but often marginalized in its major cultural institutions.

The metaphor of the estuary that guides the curatorial project—a place where different waters converge without losing their distinct properties—speaks directly to Brazil's complex history of cultural mixture and violence. Unlike the often-celebrated notion of mestiçagem that can obscure ongoing structures of racism and exclusion, Ndikung's estuary acknowledges difference while creating space for encounter. It's a subtle but crucial distinction that reflects his years of working in contexts where simplistic multiculturalism fails to address deeper asymmetries of power.

Ndikung's trajectory from Cameroon to Germany, from biotechnology to contemporary art, has equipped him with what he calls a "biotechnological" approach to curating—understanding exhibitions as living systems that evolve through interaction rather than static displays of objects. This methodology, developed through years of running SAVVY Contemporary on a shoestring budget in a former wedding salon in Berlin's Wedding district, treats constraints not as limitations but as generative forces.

The "Invocations" that precede the main exhibition—gatherings featuring panels, poetry, music, and performance—represent this approach in action. Rather than the typical press conferences and VIP previews that mark biennial openings, these events position the exhibition as the continuation of an already-ongoing conversation. They acknowledge that the work of "conjugating humanity," as Ndikung puts it, cannot be confined to gallery walls or opening weeks.

Perhaps most significantly, Ndikung's biennial promises to engage seriously with sound as a carrier of knowledge and resistance. His interest in musical forms like Gnawa, Gwoka, Taraab, and Kankyō ongaku suggests an understanding that some forms of knowledge and memory are carried not in images or texts but in rhythms and frequencies that move through bodies and across time. In a city like São Paulo, where the sounds of samba, funk, and a dozen other musical traditions provide the soundtrack to daily life, this attention to the sonic feels particularly apt.

As the São Paulo Biennial approaches its 75th anniversary, Ndikung's edition represents both a reckoning with its history and a reimagining of its future. Can an institution born from mid-century dreams of modernization transform itself into a space for what Ndikung calls "humanity as practice"? Can it maintain its position as a major international art event while genuinely serving the communities that surround it? These questions don't have easy answers, but in refusing to walk only the established roads, Ndikung and his team are creating space for new possibilities to emerge. In a world that desperately needs new models for how we might live together, their experiment in sustained attention and radical openness feels less like an art exhibition and more like a survival strategy for the species.