Dr. Portia Malatjie

Dr. Portia Malatjie is a curator and Senior Lecturer in Art History and Discourse of Art at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art. She has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and books, as well as exhibition catalogues, including Third Text, the 2018 Berlin Biennale catalogue, Artforum, and Frieze. Her essays include “Curative Curation: Black Women Curators as Restorative Agents” (forthcoming in Edinburgh University Press’s The Edinburgh Companion to Curatorial Futures), and “Cosmic Sister Circles: Ancestral Activism, Spiritual Technologies, and Black Women’s Citational Practices in Sethembile Msezane’s Falling” (forthcoming in Art Journal). Malatjie was Head Curator of Brundyn+ Gallery, Cape Town (2013 – 2015); Director of the AVA Gallery, Cape Town (2015); and curator at Tiwani Contemporary, London (2017 – 2018). Her co-curated exhibitions include Trade Winds: Yinka Shonibare CBE (2019) and When Rain Clouds Gather: Black South African Women Artists, 1940 – 2000 (2022) at Norval Foundation in Cape Town, as well as Ecologies of Elsewhere (2023) at the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Centre. She is curator of Batlhaping Ba Re! Mmakgabo Mapula Helen Sebidi (2018) and the South African Pavilion at the 2024 60 th Venice Biennale with an exhibition titled Quiet Ground. Malatjie is a 2023 Yale University Visiting Scholar, and her research explores Blackness through the intersection of sound, spirituality, Black ecologies, and Black feminism.