Describing a networked practice through conversation: An interview with Brooklyn J. Pakathi
In an attempt to understand different perspectives and voices on digital art in South Africa within a Global South/Majority World context, I interviewed transmedia artist Brooklyn J. Pakathi on 2 March 2023 via Zoom to hear their views on networked online curatorial practices and how these types of practices often diffuse the line between artist and curator.
Brooklyn and I have been peers and friends since 2017, when the relationship began over a shared love of the internet, a digital aesthetic, and an eagerness to develop a creative practice. Since then, we have worked on and off together on exhibitions, in workshops, and supporting each other through new projects and academic pursuits. We share and connect over an interest in unpacking contemporary digital arts practice. What follows is an edited version of our discussion on networked curatorial practice and the South African contemporary art landscape.
Carly Whitaker: Could you reflect on your professional background, what led you to your interest in digital art and your initial encounters with it?
Brooklyn J. Pakathi: My professional background is shifting between the terms or categorisations of digital art to new media and considering myself a new media artist, and then working as an independent curator with digital and new media arts predominantly focused on artists from the Global South. My initial encounters were really just experimentation and play before I knew anything better, but then going down the rabbit hole of the internet and finding artists and creators who are working with digital art.
Whitaker: Did a lot of this happen while you were based in South Africa or was it in different contexts and locations?
Pakathi: Definitely in different contexts. Growing up in Canada, moving around and then settling for a few years in South Africa.
Whitaker: Could you share a bit about our working relationship over the years?
Pakathi: We’ve collaborated in different ways: as artists, and curators, having my work shown and interpreted by you. Working with Floating Reverie (Fig. 1),[1] to put together an installation for the residency program. Then further along, supporting you and your curatorial role at TMRW (Fig. 2).[2] But also in a more personal sense, a lot of personal conversations that I believe had some form of emotional labour within them.
Fig. 1: Brooklyn J Pakathi, cover image for //2Week residency titled ‘my weight in grams’ (2017).
Fig. 2: Installation view of the exhibition Digital Gardens, curated by Carly Whitaker at TMRW (Johannesburg), with Brooklyn J Pakathi’s artwork on the right. Image courtesy of Anthea Pokroy.
Whitaker: Thank you. There is something special in that. What’s been quite difficult for me over the years is to reconcile with my role(s) as an artist and curator – what I am and what I do.
Pakathi: The kind of categorisation or the positioning of myself has been related to my artistic practice, as I find myself on a path of learning, growing, and moving into different types of art. As a curator, what has remained the same throughout my career is that I wear both of those hats sometimes. I most often would describe myself as both an artist, a new media installation artist, and a curator. I guess for the most part I would want to continue working independently.
Whitaker: As a curator, you’ve worked with a range of different digital media and technologies. What do you think the digital medium demands, affords, or requires of a curator, whether it’s skills, methodologies, strategies, or even positioning?
Pakathi: First and foremost, it really requires attention to detail more than anything, because there are so many variables in working with the medium. Attention to detail is required more than other traditional forms of art, not to say that care isn’t needed for other forms of artistic practice. You have to come up with creative, intuitive, logical, and practical ways to work with digital art. But second to that, the medium affords another form of immersion. I think that’s why so many artists are attracted to this work, because of the immersion that it allows, but also how much more accessible it can be, even though it can get super technical. It’s more accessible to people who might not have an art background or even just the finances to access that education.
What it requires from a curator is care. I see a lot of new media and digital art curators who are just so sloppy. I think that the digital medium requires care. It also requires a deep feeling or connection to the work, outside of its aesthetic appeal. A connection to the work and a deep understanding of the work is necessary to truly get the best out of the work.
Whitaker: This notion of care is so important. So often digital art can be gimmicky or trendy. There isn’t the contextualisation, the understanding of what the artwork means, where it sits in art history, or the context that it was made in.
Pakathi: It is lacking, more so than with traditional forms of art.
Whitaker: What do you think working in the South African context demands of a curator?
Pakathi: What it can afford is a more authentic experience as to why artists make art. South Africa is a very political country, and I think that the politics of race, gender, history, and socio-economic issues are super central to how the country operates and functions. And that then feeds a form of creativity that you can’t really find elsewhere. Not to say that South Africa is an island, but it has a specific energy that you can’t really find elsewhere and that is experienced through the art that artists are making. And for any historian, academic, philosopher, and even curator, it provides so much to work with. And what it requires is space. Unless you’re working institutionally, which is quite rare, space is a big issue. Physical space to realise exhibitions. And next to that is funding. Funding for that space, but also funding for putting on an exhibition or presentation. Space and funding can also fuel conversations. Because I don’t think that the way we’re experiencing or engaging with exhibitions is at the level that it could be.
Whitaker: What are the other gaps that you see in the digital art space in South Africa from a curatorial or even an artistic perspective?
Pakathi: I think the gap is education. Education is very inaccessible to most citizens of the country. We have to think about the socio-economic realities of South Africa. If you are studying and you’re spending so much money to study, ideally you want to study something that has some form of guaranteed financial stability. But if you’re going to take a risk on something like digital art, the people who are going to take that risk are far fewer. If there was more accessibility to education, even workshops or mentoring, there would be more digital artists and the scene would take up a bigger chunk of the contemporary art space in the country. Even now, it’s a little bit worse than a few years ago. So many of the people who were instrumental have left or are doing other things with their lives, or they had to resort to capitalism and have changed their digital art practices to studio practices.
Whitaker: As a curator, how would you describe your practice? Do you have a specific intention or type of project that you work on?
Pakathi: My focus is on artists who are from or working within the Global South and using new media and digital art tools or contexts to make work. I’m specifically interested in new forms of exhibition-making, or rather alternative forms of exhibition-making that exist outside of a Western, homogeneous, Eurocentric understanding of exhibitions.
Whitaker: How would you describe your curatorial process for a project?
Pakathi: It really depends on the context or the requirements or the intention of the exhibition. Sometimes exhibitions are commissioned or are time specific, or are proposed by artists or institutions. Other times it might be a theme or an idea or some form of gesture or prompt that then manifests in an exhibition. And other times, it’s purely a desire to work with an artist or set of artists, and from there finding a way to create an exhibition around them and their work.
Whitaker: Is there a specific way you go about working with different artists, or is it also dependent on context?
Pakathi: Yeah, I think it’s always dependent on context. I always try to initiate and maintain an artist-curator dialogue. That can be towards what the artist might be making, but also to what the artist is thinking and feeling in their life. These relationships or connections that are created are special, because I’m interested in the artists and their art, but more so I’m interested in what motivates them and what drives them to make art. I want to be a conduit to helping them express that and share that with an audience.
Whitaker: And how do you think that your practice as an artist influences your practice as a curator?
Pakathi: When I’m making work as an artist, I’m thinking about how I’m going to display or present it in space. And that requires a kind of curatorial eye or expertise, because it’s one thing to make work and just say that it lives and whatever happens to it happens. But I also want to think about how artists and audiences are experiencing that work within an exhibition context, or even outside of an exhibition context.
Whitaker: How did COVID-19 impact your practice as a curator or as an artist?
Pakathi: It allowed myself and others to not be so afraid. It’s given more people the opportunity to work more collaboratively. It has given rise to more visibility, to more discourse, and to what I said was often lacking in South Africa: education. There was more open communication between people, Whatsapp groups, Discord, Reddit forums, other spaces where more people could speak about art and specifically about digital art. So in that way it opened me up to new friends, new audiences, and I became closer with people who I idolised before.
Whitaker: Yeah, it’s interesting. This idea of a network, and the way in which it became almost our only option during that time.
Pakathi: Exactly.
Whitaker: And as curators and artists to varying extents, working in the digital art space or new media art space, we gravitate towards these networks and towards this networked way of working. And that’s often how these spaces emerge and the medium gets explored more. In terms of South Africa in a broader context it may manifest in different ways. But how do you feel that the network that you find yourself in, in terms of collaboration and correspondence with people and other projects or conversations, impacts the way you work? And does that network shift and change?
Pakathi: Yeah, it impacts it in that I feel I have a little bit more confidence since I feel I can reach out and connect with people. That creates a level in which knowledge distribution is a little bit more personal. You can have more intimate conversations with people while still learning and growing. So in that sense, just being able to touch base and interact and learn from someone has really been a positive experience.
Whitaker: Are your networks that you engage with in different contexts or situations?
Pakathi: For me, not really. It’s just growing and expanding. But I do want it to change. I want to work with people who are really on the periphery.
Whitaker: Within these networks, do you feel like there’s reciprocity, whether it’s South Africa or in a broader context?
Pakathi: In South Africa there is definitely reciprocity through conversations, through working together. In that exchange of what artists are doing, what their practices might be, what they’re doing in their personal lives – it opens up the possibility for future collaborations, for new opportunities in other spaces. That has definitely happened to me regularly, where I might have worked with someone and they lead me to someone else or vice versa. The reciprocity is quite strong in that sense and in the digital art scene specifically.
Authors
Brooklyn J. Pakathi is a transmedia artist with an ongoing studio practice in Vienna. Much of their most recent work interrogates the ontology of emotion through material and spatial interventions. Operating at the intersection of phenomenology and affect theory, sentimental longing, melancholy, and various other configurations of intimacy affirm their practice. Pakathi constructs objects, images, and environments to connect and abstract the underlying architecture of these profound and complex psychological forces. Their practice challenges the perceived boundaries between the tangible and the intangible, inviting a reconsideration of how we embody and externalise our inner emotional landscapes. Pakathi’s work engages in a dialectic between the personal and the universal, through a language of form, space, and materiality. By recontextualising the familiar, they reveal the latent emotional potentialities inherent in our material world.
Carly Whitaker is an independent curator, researcher, and artist currently based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She completed her PhD at the University of Reading (UK) in 2024, focusing on curatorial networked methodologies in South Africa. She has experience initiating and working in substantial institutions that are innovative in their curatorial approach and focus on practice-based research. Her position as Artistic and Curatorial Direct at TMRW reflects this, as well as curatorial projects such as Floating Reverie, an online digital residency running for over six years, and Blue Ocean, an online digital project space initiated in 2022. Her multifaceted experience in lecturing, industry roles, and research positions contributes to her extensive knowledge of design research practices. Committed to creating spaces for digital artists and those working with technology, she is particularly interested in the medium’s potential for artistic research and its role in shaping artistic practices.
[1] Floating Reverie is a digital residency programme which I started in 2014 as a result of a perceived lack of spaces for digital artists in South Africa. Pakathi participated in the residency in 2017 and 2018. Pakathi also contributed a visual essay to the publication 5 Years, which reflected on the first five years of Floating Reverie: www.floatingreverie.co.za/.
[2] The Mixed Reality Workshop (TMRW) was based in Johannesburg from 2018-2022. Pakathi was the Curatorial Director in 2019-2020, and from 2020-2022, I was the Curatorial Director: www.tmrw.art.