On a clear morning in early June, German legislators, Berlin city officials, ambassadors and other dignitaries gathered at the door of a colossal modernist building, waiting for a Vodou priest to conclude a ritual under a tree.
The priest, Jean-Daniel Lafontant, had come from Haiti to help reopen the House of World Cultures, Berlin’s distinguished but sloppy center for non-European art and ideas. It was his job to invoke Papa Legba – the guardian of thresholds and intersections – before the doors opened to a radically reinvented institution.
The House – or HKW, as everyone calls it, using its German initials – is a ponderous beast, an anachronism with promises. It boasts prestige and generous state funding. There’s room: a 1957 convention hall with a concrete square and a dramatically curved roof. (The building was an American gift to West Berlin during the Cold War.)
But the mission was ambiguous, right down to the name, with the smell of World’s Fair pavilions. Founded in 1989 at the dawn of multiculturalism, and just months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, HKW oscillates between programs that emphasize foreignness – for example, exhibitions about one country, or ‘world’ music and films – and more complex dishes.
In recent years, with debates in Germany about migration, Israeli-Palestinian policy and the rise of the far right seeping into the cultural sphere, HKW seemed to be huddled in an academic stance, aiming, according to its now-archived former website, to “reflect to get going’. processes and devise new frames of reference.”
To create new dynamics, the government has made an atypical choice for a state institution. Since January it has been led by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, a former microbiologist from Cameroon, who emerged as a curator, critic and charismatic figure in Berlin’s alternative art scene.
Ndikung, who became a German citizen in 2006, is HKW’s first non-white director. The institution had never had a non-European staff curator until its ultra-diverse new team arrived. Their first step was to close HKW for four months – for maintenance, but actually for much more: a total overhaul of the programs and their spirit.
Since its reopening, HKW has been running at a manic pace. It hosted a weekend-long festival on the spirit of the Haitian Revolution, and another on artificial intelligence and ancestral knowledge. Lectures and films delve deeper into topics such as queer performance and the black history of Berlin. The grounds are buzzing with concerts and DJ sets.
Throughout the building is ‘O Quilombismo’, an exhibition featuring 68 artists inspired by the quilombos, self-governing communities founded by freed and escaped enslaved people in Brazil. Many of the works in the exhibition (which runs through September 17) are new commissions – further proof that Ndikungs HKW is investing serious money.
You could say that Ndikung came out swinging, but he rejects the battle metaphor. “Love has everything to do with it,” he said in an interview in July. “How can we build a society based on love? That is really the project we are trying to realize here.”
The first returns are positive. HKW reports record visitor numbers. Artist Temitayo Ogunbiyi, who built a child-friendly outdoor installation for the exhibition, called the reopening festivities, full of families from all backgrounds, the most joyful she has ever seen.
Boosting HKW is no easy feat, even with a strong program. The building is located in a vortex of state power, next to the Chancellor’s office and close to the German Parliament. The presence of security can feel terrifying. “Each time I pass by, despite being the director of this institution, I have to look left and right,” Ndikung said. “That is the truth.”
Ndikung said he was not attracted to HKW when he arrived in Berlin as a student in the mid-1990s. After entering the art world, he respected the seriousness of the institution, but was annoyed by its mentality. “I was very critical of the House,” Ndikung said. “I wrote critical lyrics about the ‘being different’ that I thought was happening here.”
But, he said, he applied for the job when the 2021 opening was announced because “we can’t always be on the other side and complain that institutions need to change.”
Ndikung was trained as a scientist, but grew up among writers in Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, and Bamenda, the main city of the English-speaking western region. His parents’ circle included professors, playwrights and poets. At the University of Yaoundé, he avoided classes, preferring to associate with musicians and artists.
He also studied German at the Yaoundé department of the Goethe-Institut, following a friend. His mother sent potatoes from Bamenda to sell and pay the expenses. When he was eligible for a visa to Germany, his family mortgaged their home to finance his travels. “One day I will write a book about my odd jobs,” he said of the work he did in construction, restaurants and more to pay them back from Berlin.
Ndikung’s academic path pointed to a brilliant career in the life sciences: a biotechnology degree in Berlin, a PhD in Düsseldorf, and postdocs in Berlin and Montpellier, France. Before writing seriously about art, he published on mutation mechanisms in chronic myelogenous leukemia.
But his profession snuck up on him. When he visited Documenta in 2002, the prestigious five-yearly exhibition in Kassel, Germany, he noticed that the Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor had organized it. “It was like a different world,” he said – an appealing world. He started helping art students with writing and organizing pop-up exhibitions.
For ten years he stopped reading fiction to delve more into art history. “From the Renaissance painters to all movements,” he said, “I’ve always known I studied them from my position as an African—seeing what was missing in those stories, while also learning them.”
In 2009, Ndikung started the Savvy Contemporary art space with a few colleagues, first in a storefront in the immigrant-rich neighborhood of Neukölln. It later moved to Wedding, a district with a strong union history. Savvy became a force; the exhibitions and events brought artists and scientists into contact with local families and residents, with an emphasis on conviviality.
Ndikung left his last scientific job – at a medical device company – when he joined the curatorial team for Documenta 14 in 2017. As a curator and a prolific writer and critic, he has become a well-known presence in the global art circuit. Those credentials and his academic status – he is ‘Herr Professor Doktor Ndikung’, even though his qualifications are not in the arts – tick the official boxes to lead HKW
But his success at Savvy was a crucial factor, says Andreas Görgen, secretary general of the German Ministry of Culture. “He has proven his ability to run a house as a focal point in the community,” Görgen said of Ndikung. “Now we are asking him to adopt these skills and support the community building of Germany as an immigrant society.”
Ndikung’s new role brings him into the political fray in Germany, as Culture Minister Claudia Roth made clear in an exuberant but sharp speech at the reopening of HKW. She thanked him warmly for choosing to become a German, but turned around and noted that this made him part of a “Täternation” – a nation of perpetrators, referring to the guilt of Nazism and the Holocaust.
After praising “intersectional solidarity,” she warned that the BDS movement to boycott, repudiate and punish Israel over Palestinian occupation — a campaign the German parliament has labeled anti-Semitic — would not be tolerated.
Ndikung has heard it before. After his appointment by Roth’s predecessor Monika Grütters in 2021, the newspaper Die Welt accused him of BDS sympathies. Detractors pointed to a 2014 Facebook post in which he said Israel would “pay a million times over” for its bombing of Gaza. Ndikung has reiterated that he does not support BDS; Roth, then in office, supported him.
The larger context is the current state of Germany’s “remembrance culture,” in which accusations of anti-Semitism are routinely leveled against critics of Israeli policies (even Jewish ones), resulting in a series of event cancellations and withdrawn invitations for Palestinian thinkers from German institutions.
Last year, the appearance of an anti-Semitic image in a mural-like work by an Indonesian collective at Documenta 15 led to the dismissal of the exhibition’s director. As director of HKW, Ndikung knows that critics wait for every mistake.
But he also wants to get the debate out of the swamp. “The real anti-Semites in this country, and the xenophobes and anti-Muslims,” he said, “are gathering their strength.” He pointed to recent polls showing that the far-right Alternative for Germany party had more than 20 percent support. “This is what we need to focus on,” he said.
At HKW, Ndikung has launched a discussion series on memory politics in Germany and Europe, hosted by Jewish writer Max Czollek. “The culture of remembrance is fundamental,” says Ndikung. “The question is how to deal with it in a productive way.”
His review of the institution includes a different kind of commemoration. Each space is named after a woman in the arts or social movements, with explanatory signs. You can enter through the Nawal El Saadawi entrance, cross the Sylvia Wynter Foyer or climb the Gloria Anzaldúa Staircase. The convention hall is now the Miriam Makeba Auditorium.
Like the Vodou ritual at the reopening, the renaming of the spaces is ceremonial and symbolic. In his opening speech, Ndikung spoke of “inviting other spirits” and “reinhabiting” the institute, of finding peaceful coexistence with all “living and inanimate beings.”
It’s a different energy for a German public institution — not necessarily in sync with its counterparts — but Ndikung isn’t worried about that. “We want to build a different world,” he said. “We want to think differently about the world,” he added, “and every step matters. Every drop of water matters. And even if you come with a teaspoon, that’s fine.”
