This conversation begins with something deceptively ordinary: an exhibition opening that ends too quickly. From there, it unfolds into a meditation on how institutions produce social life through their smallest arrangements—time, seating, food, conversation, memory. Reflecting on the first half of her tenure at Kunstinstituut Melly, Gabi Ngcobo traces a curatorial practice grounded less in management than in listening, improvising, and slowly accumulating gestures that make another institutional culture imaginable.
This grounding has shaped Ngcobo’s work across distinct institutional and geographic contexts. From her curatorial practice in Johannesburg as founder of the collaborative platforms Center for Historical Reenactment (CHR) and NGO Nothing Gets Organised and in Pretoria as Curatorial Director at the Javett Art Center, to collaborative projects for the 10th Berlin Biennial and the 32nd São Paulo Biennial, she has consistently approached exhibition-making as a collective and situated form of knowledge production rather than as a vehicle for singular authorship.
María Inés Plaza Lazo: Gabi, what is different about Melly these days?
Gabi Ngcobo: For me, it’s the exhibition opening format itself. I know it sounds small, but it’s really important. When I arrived, the institution was still operating with an inherited rhythm: Friday evening openings at 6pm; everybody arrives at once; everything peaks quickly, and by 7.30 or 8pm it’s basically over. People leave because they have dinner elsewhere, or trains back to Amsterdam or The Hague, or other plans. So you get this compressed social moment—very intense, but also very short-lived.
And I remember after the first opening—which was very successful, packed, a lot of energy in the house—thinking: after 45 minutes almost everyone was gone. And I was standing there thinking, but it’s only 8. What just happened?
Then there was dinner afterwards. We tried to organize something in a restaurant, and it immediately became a social puzzle. Who do you invite? Who sits with whom? It produces hierarchy in a very informal way. In the end it became almost absurd—we ran out of food, people were eating bread. It was chaotic, and it still didn’t resolve inclusion, it just reproduced it differently.
So at some point it became clear we had to do it differently. We moved openings to Saturdays, during the day, and stretched the format—not to make it bigger, but more breathable. People can come in and out. They are not locked into a single peak moment. Families can come with children, and children’s programming doesn’t need to be separated from what is considered the “main” or “serious” part. It can all exist in the same temporal field.
We also changed food. We started serving it here, without RSVP, without pre-selecting who eats together. Just making enough for everyone, as much as possible, without that secondary layer of exclusivity that happens after the opening.
What surprised me is that it became cheaper than going to a restaurant. But, more importantly, it changes the social dynamic. People stay longer, talk differently, don’t rush into predefined groups. They move, disappear, return, and sit again. There is music, but no pressure to perform participation—you can listen, respond, or just be in it.
So it becomes more fluid, less segmented.
Installation view of Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme: Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom, on view from Saturday 18 April to Sunday 27 September 2026 at Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam. Photography: Kristien Daem
MIPL: So the institution becomes less of an event machine.
GN: Yes. Less extraction, more inhabitation. And that’s where symbolic change becomes concrete. It’s not about renaming or declaration—it’s about micro-conditions of encounter: time, access, hospitality, fatigue, care. Those small infrastructures that decide whether people can remain together or whether everything is structured around arrival and departure. That’s where the shift is.
MIPL: Can you be more concrete about this shift?
GN: I don’t want to trap myself in a checklist of “what I’ve done”. That’s not why I came here. And it’s also not concrete in that sense. I didn’t arrive with a fixed mission of transformation. That’s not how it works for me.
MIPL: But it’s also not about a checklist. It’s more about how we can stay in conversation with these practices, and let them resonate elsewhere.
GN: Yes. For me what was interesting about coming to Melly is that there is this six-year rhythm of leadership. Every six years a director changes. And I thought: that’s actually quite beautiful. Because it gives you a frame—a time span that is long enough to work within, but finite enough not to pretend permanence.
Each director arrives with a vision, a history, a set of experiences. So the institution becomes a place where you can bring something, but also learn what is already working, what doesn’t need to be transformed, what has its own intelligence. So it’s not only about change. It’s also about listening.
With the previous period—marked by Sofia [Hernández Chong Cuy]—it’s important to say that what people often call “the name change” was not a single symbolic gesture but a long, intense process. It involved internal pressure, public debate, and it unfolded within a wider global context—COVID, the murder of George Floyd, the intensified visibility of structural violence. It wasn’t an isolated institutional question; it was forced open by events far beyond the institution.
And I don’t want to treat that lightly.
So the question for me is: how do you stay with these questions over time, instead of closing them too quickly? Instead of saying: the box is ticked, the name is changed, we move on.
Because in reality we still talk about the name all the time. I do as well. It hasn’t disappeared; it circulates. Even Google Maps still shows traces of the old name. I notice it when students come, or when people try to find the place. There is still a kind of double naming that lingers.
Suitcase Economy Brunch #5, by Riet Wijnen, on Saturday 28 March 2026 at Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam. Photography: Liza Wolters
MIPL: Yes, I still see it when I type it in—it redirects and Witte de Witte appears in the route.
GN: And that tells you something. Institutional change is never fully clean or immediate. It leaves residue.
And then there are concrete decisions, but I hesitate when the conversation becomes only about “what you did” in a managerial sense. The more interesting question is how those decisions sit inside a longer process of inhabiting change.
For example, downstairs there are different spaces. One was already part of MELLY, and then there was TENT, and other configurations before. When those arrangements shifted, we took over some of those spaces and began to rethink them—especially in relation to education and participation. But I’m not sure the most interesting layer is administrative. It’s more: what kind of social space emerges from that?
MIPL: But I want to insist on the concrete—on what actually changes materially, because otherwise it stays too abstract.
GN: I hear that, but I also don’t want to be pushed only into the register of the concrete. What I’m describing is something that resists being fully pinned down.
I’ve been here for two and a half years. That’s a decent amount of time, but not enough for everything to solidify. A lot of things are still gestures, still experiments. And that matters.
For instance, I was interested in opening a space on the ground floor that could mirror the main institution in another way—like the Cantina space, which predates Melly as Melly. That history is always slightly unstable, because the naming keeps shifting.
The idea was a space open in terms of participation—where knowledge production is not tied to a single entry point, where different publics can enter from different directions.
Because when we talk about education in museums, we often look at numbers—schools, first encounters, volume. But there are other layers that matter just as much: students from universities here in Rotterdam, people who are isolated, or simply looking for social contact or forms of belonging that don’t exist elsewhere. I wanted a space that could hold that multiplicity.
That is still in progress. And part of why it remains in progress is simple: it requires resources. Money.
And I don’t say that in a romantic way. I actually find it difficult to say it, because I’m not from here. In other contexts you can sometimes build things that are less dependent on formal funding structures. But here the structure is different. If you want things to be in line with a formalized fairness (Fair Pay), if you want them to be sustainable, you need resources.
Installation view of Hajra Waheed: There Is a Fountain Even If Pale That Flows Beneath Us All, on view from Saturday 18 April 2026 to Sunday 6 September 2026 at Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam. Photography: Aad Hoogendoorn
MIPL: At the same time, we are in a broader condition where our relationship to money is entangled with capitalism, while also dependent on it. And maybe this is precisely the moment to rethink that relation.
GN: Yes, but that requires time, and bringing people into that idea who may not have experienced that kind of relationality before.
In Johannesburg I can do that almost instinctively. But here the “father”, if I can put it that way, is very present—a structure that regulates things, takes care of them, but also controls them quite significantly. And, in some ways, this is the first time I’m working in that kind of context. I see its value, but also its limits.
MIPL: There is something almost post-structural in that tension with authority—something that tries to undo verticality while still operating within it.
GN: It’s a tension, not something that resolves easily. Hopefully it becomes a productive one.
MIPL: The tension feels comfortable though, as it allows the space to be otherwise. I felt this strongly at the exhibition of Marilyn Nance and donna Kukama—sitting on those sofas, it felt like a living room. Not metaphorically, but literally. And what struck me was that this furniture was not only for visitors, but for everyone inhabiting the space. Shared infrastructure. And at the same time, it’s modernist furniture.
GN: Modernist. I see. I thought I heard “nest”, like “mother nest”—that would be very ambitious. (laughs)
donna Kukama: I Breathe, You Breathe, on view from Saturday 11 October 2025 to Sunday 29 March 2026 at Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam. Photography: Aad Hoogendoorn
MIPL: How did you come to choose this furniture for a future-oriented program?
GN: I didn’t think of it as “choosing modernist furniture”, but I am generally drawn to the 1950s. There’s something there I keep circling around.
The furniture also came from earlier projects in the Cantina space. We showed the artist Thato Toeba the room and asked what they saw, and they immediately said: “this room is uncomfortable.” And that was interesting, because comfort is never neutral. It is produced through a coded visual language—often precisely that modernist language of the lounge, of the idea that you can “have a lounge” as a social unit.
In many African contexts this is tied to a historical moment—late colonialism, independence, the emergence of a new middle class. There is an aspiration embedded in it: “I now have a lounge, and it will look like this.” A form of self-invention through interiors.
So we started looking for furniture with Thato. They were searching for something that reminded them of their grandmother’s house. And what was striking is how often it is the same furniture, just displaced across generations and aspirations.
At some point you realize the living room is not just domestic—it is narrative. It carries class mobility, memory, imitation, rejection, all at once.
We now have a basement full of this furniture. Not as archive in a formal sense, but as something pragmatic: we don’t throw it away, we reuse it. It circulates through exhibitions, setups, situations.
MIPL: So it’s also quite affordable.
GN: Yes, but that’s not the only reason. There is also something about accumulation—about not separating exhibition furniture from life furniture.
Paul, the previous deputy director who was here for over three decades, also had a similar sensibility. He had an obsession with chairs. I think I inherited part of that without fully realising it.
I also collect chairs. They appear everywhere in my life, in different homes, in different corners. Then suddenly you find yourself in a basement full of chairs, sofas, tables, and you realize: this is a kind of archive, even if it never calls itself that.
So we go down, bring things up, rearrange. Not only curatorial, but logistical—assembling temporary social environments.
Installation view of donna Kukama: I Breathe, You Breathe, on view from Saturday 11 October 2025 to Sunday 29 March 2026 at Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam. Photography: Kristien Daem
MIPL: It has a patina, a sense of timelessness, but also that ’50s international moment of balance, before the fully deregulated accumulation we see now.
GN: Yes. And for me the key thing is that I want things to be used. In my grandmother’s house everything was covered in protective plastic—you couldn’t touch anything, everything was protected from life.
MIPL: I remember that plastic too. It becomes an ornament in itself.
GN: Exactly. The whole house becomes an ornament. And in my parents’ house there are still traces of that logic—objects not for use but for display. They signal status, arrival, achievement: “we are here now.”
MIPL: So it carries pride, but also distance from use.
GN: Yes. And I am more interested in the opposite direction: things meant to be used, even if they wear down in the process.
MIPL: There’s also a systemic issue in museums here. There are often no chairs. Where do you sit and think?
GN: “Where are the chairs?” It sounds banal, but it’s actually a serious question.
Since these sofas and chairs started appearing in the exhibitions, I miss them everywhere else. It changes how you experience space—you are not only looking, you are staying.
Every exhibition has its own logic of conviviality. In the Marilyn Nance show it became very clear we needed seating. Even with an archive of furniture, we still had to source additional pieces for that context.
It keeps accumulating. And at some point I think: we should probably just do an exhibition of the furniture itself.
MIPL: So far, you’ve also dedicated exhibitions to specific bodies of work. Are you changing curatorial approaches too?
GN: I didn’t really change them in a clean way. It was already a kind of mess when I arrived—and it remains a functioning mess.
When I came, a group show was already running. It was supposed to end in May. I started in January and wasn’t ready to produce a new show by then, so we extended it until September and opened the new season afterwards.
That shifted the entire rhythm of the building. We are still trying to find a stable temporality—because exhibitions overlap differently, time stretches and compresses at once.
On top of that there is the policy plan cycle in the Netherlands. Every four years you produce a large document that determines funding. It defines what you say you will do, what framework you operate in, what language you use.
When I arrived, that was one of the first things I had to do with the team: understand the document and produce it almost immediately.
I was appointed in August and by October 2023 I was already planning the writing of it with the Melly team. Everything felt unstable globally anyway. It was a strange moment to formulate a “four-year plan” for anything.
And these frameworks often come with keywords—interconnectivity, inclusivity, and innovation, —and you are expected to position yourself within them.
So I added another I: improvisation.
MIPL: I want to arrive at Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s exhibition and the thread of drawing across the exhibitions.
GN: I think in every sense. We work from knowledge, so we also draw from knowledge—from experience, archives, histories that are not always visible. I was also thinking about prisons in that sense: spaces that produce knowledge in constrained, ambivalent ways. Even prison can be thought of as a kind of school.
MIPL: I keep coming back to class consciousness here, too. Drawing can transcend class divisions.
GN: It can, but it can also reinforce them. I was also thinking about borders—lines that separate, organise, exclude.
With Nohemí Pérez, for example, it is easy to say this is drawing, but I am thinking about the subject matter: people moving through forests, through territories, trying to reach somewhere else. That movement is not abstract—it is material, political.
So withdrawal becomes interesting. Not only retreat, but searching for another possibility of life—another relation to those lines already drawn for us. That connects to marooning as well: escape as refusal, not leaving a trace in the way systems expect.
And drawing as language itself. We often learn to draw before we write, [it is] a pre-linguistic form of thinking. So when language fails, you return to drawing. Another register of articulation.
MIPL: Drawing becomes this axis between beginnings and endings.
GN: Yes, but I don’t think about beginnings and endings. I think more in what I’d call “the changing same”. Not starting and finishing, but variation within continuity. Improvisation is close to that.
Miles Davis once said: “I’ll play it first, and tell you what it is, later.” I like that—the idea that meaning comes after the act, not before.
So I’m not defining this six-year period as a fixed project. It is about listening—to what emerges, what shifts, what returns differently. Call and response: you listen, you answer, and only afterwards you may start to understand what the conversation was.
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- Cover Image:
<p class="p1"><span>Installation view of Marilyn Nance: Spirit Faith Grace Rage, on view from Saturday 13 December 2025 to Sunday 3 May 2026 at Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam. Photography: Kristien</span></p>
