iZinkisi: A Techno-Spiritual Symphony

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This lecture by the South African post-disciplinary curator and artist is a sustained multimedia meditation on African relics and spiritual objects - the Nkisi, plural Zinkisi - the non-normative and the irreducibility of indigenous languages. Nkhensani traces ancestral technologies and interfaces, such as the nkisi and indigenous languages, to explore and contextualize them within the wider context of today's dominant communication technologies. A nkisi, like a computer as a communication device, becomes a technological prosthesis for a human being in the sense that it stores information and connects different spaces. This talk aims to explore new and old technologies, focusing on methods of de-anthropomorphizing digital technologies using Bantu and Nguni cosmogonies. By decentering notions of dominant communication technologies, Nkhensani offers to rethink ways of being-with technology. The lecture will be in English and will be followed by a discussion. Nkhensani Mkhari (b. 1994) is a South African post-disciplinary curator and artist who engages in a variety of practices under the guiding principle that “the medium chooses the message.” Their work, a queer meditation on transience, aesthetic sociology, and the relationship between Ntu (Bantu and Nguni) )spiritual practices and technology, navigates the nuances of individuality, collectivity, and shared spaces. Brooklyn J. Pakathi (enby) is a media artist and curator with an ongoing studio practice in Vienna. Much of their most recent work concerns itself with the language and materiality of emotion. Their curatorial work is shaped by an interest in decolonial curatorial practices and a search for alternative curatorial strategies that can be used to embed cultural equity. Brooklyn works in actioning cultures of technology, developing inclusive and alternative definitions of the technological and using virtual space to deploy artistic practice and discourse outside of the modern colonial world system. Denise Helene Sumi (b. 1986) in Switzerland is a researcher, editor, and sometimes curates exhibitions. She is a PhD candidate at the Peter Weibel Research Institute for Digital Cultures at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and co-director of the art space Kevin Space in Vienna. She engages with artistic practices that embrace and maintain technology-based relationality, transversal knowledge exchange, and collective approaches that establish and sustain a socially and politically joyful life with technology.

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