Orphée Kashala & Candice Nembhard

What is the role of a curator? How can insight into a curator’s practice help us engage more deeply with an exhibition?

Join curators Orphée Kashala and Candice Nembhard for an open and critical conversation about curating exhibitions and other creative projects. This exchange offers insight into Kashala and Nembhard’s individual approaches to curatorship, with reflections on recent projects in Birmingham and elsewhere.

Through their conversation, Kashala and Nembhard seek to expand understanding around and demystify the role of the curator: the significance of collaborating with artists and other creative practitioners; the realities of working as freelance curators; and the factors that can help or hinder free, creative curatorial expression.

Orphée Kashala is curator of Ikon’s exhibition by artist Exodus Crooks, Epiphany (Temporaire), commissioned by Ort Gallery and International Curators Forum (ICF), originally presented at Block 336 in Summer 2023.

This event is organised in partnership with International Curators Forum (ICF).

About the speakers

Orphée Kashala is a UK-based Pan-African and Diasporic art curator and cultural producer. Kashala was selected in 2021 for the Emergence(y) project in Birmingham, an Ort Gallery and ICF residency provision for emerging curators to develop their practices. His curatorial practice is a recourse to art and artists as mediums to lead the collective interrogation, interpretation and reckoning with human complexity. Kashala leans into contradiction and complication to untangle an intrinsically resistant, liberated, and decolonised counter-visuality.

Candice Nembhard (okcandice) is a writer, artist-curator, archivist and musician based between Birmingham and Berlin. They are the Digital Curator for Birmingham Museum & Gallery and 2023/24 Woven Foundation Curatorial Fellow; previously a Jerwood Arts Curatorial Fellow, Obsidian Foundation Poetry Fellow and artist-curator at Eastside Projects. Elsewhere, Nembhard is the founder-director of all fruits ripe; an independent platform for queer filmmakers of colour and Bedtime Stories; a live radio club championing experiments in ambient, electronic(a) and downtempo music.