Updates on Miliswa's projects, publications, and work.[contact]
2026 [The Materialities of the Ephemeral City]ENSA Paris-Est
Wesleyville Mission Miracles: An Interrupted Broadcast is a paper co-authored by Tuliza Sindi and Miliswa Ndziba and presented at the study day organised by ENSA Paris-Est and the LAB research institute at the Catholic University of Louvain.
2025[Umcimbi_late] ChimurengaDialogues on Soil II is co-curated by Miliswa Ndziba and Kutlwano Ramphele through the format of Umcimbi – a Black intergenerational gathering where all attendees are contributors to a living intellectual tradition. A space that emphasises collective knowledge-making, grounded in place, community, and land-based practices. Participants include: Bongisa Msutu, Phumi Morare, Dineo More, Lindokuhle Nkosi, Senzeni Marasela, Molemo Moila, Chinenye Chukwuka, Gloria Pavita, Siwe Ntombela, Tamsin Mzozoyane, Olive, Thuli Gamedze, Fundiswa Douw, Būjin & Dormant Youth.
Dialogues on Soil II is a collaboration between Chimurenga and Mpho Matsipa, the Bartlett School of Architecture – University College London, in partnership with Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Studies – University of Johannesburg, and The Gathering – Salon – a self-funded collective of African and diasporic femme and non-binary built environment practitioners.
This project is supported by the Bartlett School of Architecture Incubator Fund and and the Graham Foundation, in partnership with the JIAS, University of Johannesburg. 2024[Imminent and Eminent Ecologies] VIAD Research Centre, University of JohannesburgImminent and Eminent Ecologies is an exhibition of leading African and international artists who work with the bio-materialities of contemporary life. One thread that weaves throughout the artworks is the entanglement between living and non/living forms, and between the human and more-than-human. A second thread grapples with the effects of cultures and politics on Earth’s well-being. The exhibition advocates that one important component of holistic decolonial practice is to dismantle the artificial boundaries between species, to encourage the emergence of a trans-species democracy whose constitution is premised on what theorist and physicist Karen Barad terms ‘intra-actions’ based on empathy, care and respect.
Co-curated by Leora Farber and Brenton Maart, the exhibition showed the work of Bioart + Design Africa team members, artists-in-residence and research associates, together with invited artists Adam Broomberg and Rafael Gonzalez; Janneke de Lange; Stacy Hardy; Russel Hlongwane, Francois Knoetze and Amy Louise Wilson; Dean Hutton; Bronwyn Katz; Nandipha Mntambo; Miliswa Ndziba; Uriel Orlow; Theresa Schubert; and Louise Westerhout.
The exhibition – presented at UJ’s FADA Gallery, Johannesburg, 2024 by VIAD’s BA+DA programme – was accompanied by a programme of walkabouts, discussions, seminars and a comprehensive catalogue. [SEED Award] Prince Claus Fund
The Seed Award recognises 100 emerging talents and offers support to creative work that engages with urgent socio-political issues within their local context. Recipients receive €5.000 to freely invest in their practice, alongside global recognition, connections, and opportunities.
The Seed Award is partially made possible by Ing Yoe Tan Fund.[Forts of Sand; Passage; Strange Fruit] ArtAfrica Magazine
Ashraf Jamal examines the intricate interplay between precarious, reparative, and biological studiesthrough the lens of ‘Imminent and Eminent Ecologies,’ the gorundbreaking exhibtion curated by Leora Farber and Brenton Maart at the FADA Gallery, University of Johannesburg.
‘Forts of Sand; Passage; Strange Fruit’ by Miliswa Ndziba featured of pp.268-269.2023[Delay and Encounter and/or Other Proximate Unknowns] e-flux Announcements
Following the October 2022 debut exhibition curated by Foundation for Contemporary Art-Ghana at ifa Gallery Stuttgart, OtherNetwork continues its curatorial project in the form of a relay. For the second iteration, FCA-Ghana have invited NGO–Nothing Gets Organised from Johannesburg to guest curate an exhibition at their own space in Accra. The project Delay and Encounter and/or Other Proximate Unknowns enters a dialogue with the influential figure of W.E.B. Du Bois, whose final home and resting place surrounds the site of the exhibition. Understanding the ‘Black Outside’ as a particular spatio-temporal disposition, the project brings together multiple responses from internationally-based artists and spatial practitioners including Ola Hassanain, room19isaFactory., Jabu Arnell, Nii Noi Nortey, Luana Vitra and Natalie Penang, curated by Sinethemba Twalo for NGO–Nothing Gets Organised.[SYM|BIO|ART] VIAD Research Centre, University of Johannesburg
To mark its launch, Bioart + Design Africa is thrilled to present the first exhibition of bioart to be held in South Africa and on the African continent. Bioart involves artmaking practices that deal with the hands-on application of the latest advances in biotechnology in which ‘life’ – meaning living and non/living matter – is used as a raw material and a subject for artistic production, using (and abusing) scientific practices and protocols.
The exhibition – which was opened by Professor Letlhokwa Mpedi, Vice Chancellor of the University of Johannesburg and produced by members of Bioart + Design Africa, who constitute some of the most provocative and inventive South African practitioners working in this field – includes work by VIAD and WHRC Directors Leora Farber and Tobias Barnard, bioart-laboratory manager Xylan de Jager, VIAD artist-in-residence Brenton Maart, as well as VIAD Research Associates, Nelisiwe Xaba, Nadine Botha, Miliswa Ndziba, Nathaniel Stern and Nolan Oswald Dennis. Through their work, these artists explore innovative ways of working with existing biomaterials and producing new ones; introduce speculative ways and methods of working with living and non/living matter; and use interdisciplinary approaches to arrive at research findings that are rooted in practical activities and processes. Charting experimental practices that blur the boundaries between artist and medium, author and collaborator, whilst also engaging theory to explore how microbes might be applied as agents in decolonial practice, they enact and make visible the critical intra-actions and the interspecies entanglements that constitute post-humanist, post-anthropocentric, New Feminist Materialist and decolonial realities.2022[Situated Making] Faculty of Art Design & Architecture, University of Johannesburg
Curated by Eugene Hön, ‘Situated Making’ is the latest offering of creative outputs from academics in the University of Johannesburg’s Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture. The exhibition, which showcases recent works by 13 creative practioners, posits the artefact as creative research. In presenting ‘artworks’ as research, the exhibition challenges the primacy of the written word as vehicle for meaning making. Through their inter-disciplinary explorations across ceramics, video art, sculpture, installation, jewellery, design, architecture, assemblage and performance the featured makers question the nature of knowledge creation and dissemination. Financially supported by the University and the Faculty’s research committees, the exhibition showcases UJ’s commitment to support practice-based research and development. Although diverse in form and theme, the body of works are linked through their engagement with the social, geo-political and ecological realities that constitute being here, now.
Participating artists: Anna Abengowe, Ruth Sacks, Alison Kearney, Tuliza Sindi, Marc Edwards, Miliswa Ndziba, Lizè Groenewald, Farieda Nazier, Deirdre Pretorius, Christa van Zyl, Thato Radebe, Eugene Hön and Lukasz Pater.