Artist talk with Oscar Murillo & Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung

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Oscar Murillo (b. 1986, La Paila, Colombia) has developed a multifaceted and ambitious practice that spans painting, collaborative projects, video, sound, and installation. His work probes ideas of collectivity and shared culture, demonstrating a commitment to the power of material presence alongside critical perspectives on contemporary society.

Murillo’s large-scale participatory commission, The flooded garden, inspired by the work of Claude Monet was on view at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall during the summer of 2024. In 2023, Murillo was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Westminster and in 2019 he was one of four artists to share the prestigious Turner Prize.

Prof. Dr. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung is a curator, author and biotechnologist, currently serving as director and chief curator of Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) Berlin, Germany and chief curator of the 36. São Paulo Biennale. He is the founder and was artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin, as well as the artistic director of sonsbeek20–24, a quadrennial contemporary art exhibition in Arnhem, the Netherlands. He also worked as curator-at-large for Adam Szymczyk’s Documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany in 2017 and was guest curator of the Dak’Art biennale in Dakar, Senegal, in 2018. Additionally, he served as the artistic director for the 12th and 13th editions of the Bamako Encounters photography biennial in Mali, taking on this role in 2019 and 2022. Together with the Miracle Workers Collective, he curated the Finland Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, 2019. Prof. Dr. Ndikung was a guest professor in curatorial studies and sound art at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, and he is currently a professor in and head of the faculty of Spatial Strategies Master’s program at the Weissensee Academy of Art in Berlin. He was the recipient of the first OCAD University International Curators Residency fellowship in Toronto in 2020. His published works include, inter alia, The Delusions of Care (2021), An Ongoing-Offcoming Tale: Ruminations on Art, Culture, Politics and Us/Others (2022) and Pidginization as Curatorial Method (2023).