Please join us on Sunday, 27 July 2025 at 1PM, at Griffin Art Projects to break bread and discuss South African curator-in-residence Sven Christian’s ongoing research on the ins-and-outs of silence as a form of political agency, and the idea, expressed by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, that we ‘speak to people on the level of the other’s readiness to listen’.

The discussion will include a lunch (vegan stew). Please RSVP to info@griffinartprojects.ca to confirm your attendance and dietary restrictions. Space is limited and RSVP is mandatory.

About the Curator:

Sven Christian (Johannesburg) is a writer, editor, and curator. In early 2022, he was appointed curator of NIROX Sculpture Park and the Villa-Legodi Centre for Sculpture where he worked until earlier this year. He completed an MA in Contemporary Curatorial Practices at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2020, published in part by The Garage Journal. Between 2017 and 2018 Sven was an Assistant Curator at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA). During this time, he assisted with the museum’s opening exhibitions, managed the production of Edson Chagas’ Luanda, Encyclopaedic City (curated by Paula Nascimento and Stefano Rabolli Pansera), and was the organising curator of Publishing Against the Grain, a travelling exhibition conceived and produced by ICI, New York, which opened at Zeitz MOCAA in November 2017 before travelling to CCA, Lagos. Between 2015 and 2017 he was the assistant editor at ART AFRICA magazine. Prior to that he founded Ism- Skism, an artist-led initiative that encouraged participants to produce work in the public domain. During his residency, Sven has developed research for a hypothetical PhD on silence as a form of political agency, research soft play and pre-linguistic propaganda.

Image credit: Sven Christian