We are excited to invite you to a conversation Friday August 24 at 14 between Anawana Haloba and Gabi Ngcobo, head curator of this year’s Berlin biennale. The conversation is free of charge and open for all.

Conversations with Stitched-up Lips will present a new site-specific sound installation.

No one is capable of speaking without a mouth – and stitched-up lips suggest silence. Silence as a result of a lack of willingness to listen, or of a prohibition to speak. A conversation that defies violent muting gives association to resistance, unity and hope.

Anawana Haloba's work explores communities' contingency within historical, cultural and architectural contexts. She is currently a Phd Fellow through the Artistic Research Fellowship Programme (PKU) at the Department of Fine Art, University of Bergen. Her research looks at women's roles in independence movements and decolonialisation in Africa and the Caribbean.

Anawana Haloba (b. 1978) lives and works in Oslo. She is a graduate from the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, Evelyn Hone College of Applied Arts in Lusaka and the Academy of Fine Art in Oslo. Haloba's work has been featured in both solo- and group shows, including the Rauma Biennale, Finland; ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, Germany; the Venezia Biennale (2009); the Sydney Biennale (2008); Manifesta, Bolzano, Italy (2007), the Sharjah Biennale (2007 and 2013) as well as the biennale's in Sao Paulo (2016), Shanghai (2016) and Lyon (2017). Haloba's video installation «To Mars By All Means» was shown at Kulturkirken Jakob in Oslo August 3-12, presented by Transnational Arts Production (TrAP). Her previous solo presentation in Norway took place at Kunstnernes Hus in 2010.

Gabi Ngcobo is based in Johannesburg (South Africa) and Berlin. Ngcobo has been engaged in collaborative artistic, curatorial, and educational projects in South Africa and internationally since the early 2000s. She recently co-curated the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, in which Anawana Haloba was a participating artist.