The Process-Led Curator – Failure as Pedagogy

Lecture with Q&A: The Process-Led Curator – Failure as Pedagogy
By Kamogelo Walaza
Moderated by Keketso Kgomosotho

This lecture articulates Walaza’s emergence of the process-led curator as a distinct curatorial identity forged in failure, pedagogy and ethnographic witness. Drawing on black feminist thought and my own trajectory across multiple qualifications and disciplines, I argue that curatorial practice is not a linear accumulation of credentials but an interconnected constellation of lived experiences, disciplinary knowledge’s and embodied failures.

Kamogelo Walaza comes from Bloemfontein, a small city that teaches you to listen before you speak. Not because it is quiet though it can be but because there is distance there, between houses and opportunities, and in that distance, a child learns to notice what others drive past. That is where Kamogelo Walaza discovered her gift: not in a flash, but in the slow accumulation of looking, arranging, and asking what a thing means before deciding where it belongs. She is a curator, writer, ethnographer and programme manager. Those titles arrived after the work, not before. Johannesburg became her base, but Bloemfontein stayed in her bones a methodological orientation rather than a nostalgia. Education, for her, was never a ladder. It was a series of doorways she walked through because she had questions that would not close. Two postgraduate degrees from Wits University. Three degrees from the University of Johannesburg. She does not list them to impress. She lists them because each one changed how she sees.

There was an award: the Marshall Kander Drama for Life Award. And a paper: Memories in Her Blood, an autoethnographic study written with such care that it received distinction. That title is not metaphor. It is method. She believes some things are carried not in documentation but in the body, in the stories blood remembers when paper forgets. Her curatorial work has appeared at Oliewenhuis Art Museum, Michaelis Gallery, Nirox Sculpture Park. She has contributed to FNB Art Joburg and Turbine Art Fair. She has held residencies at Bag Factory, Goethe-Institut, Secession Vienna, MuseumsQuartier Vienna, and Nirox, each residency a period of disciplined uncertainty, a willingness to be a beginner again. She curated a solo exhibition with Sabelo Mlangeni, an experience she describes less as curation and more as conversation extended into space. In 2024, she was a Creative Knowledge Fellow. In 2025, a fellow at Secession Vienna. That same year, the Mail & Guardian named her one of the Top 200 Young South Africans. She was shortlisted for the MTN x UJ New Contemporary Awards and the NIHSS Best Creative Collections Award. These recognitions are real, but she holds them lightly. They are evidence of a practice, not its purpose.

Currently, she is a member of the 2026 cohort at The Centre for the Less Good Idea, participating in the Tête-à-Tête Artist|Producers programme, and is a Fellow Scholls balmoral artist Residency. And she leads her own Practice, WALAZAS PRACTICE, which is not a brand but a commitment: to process over product and to curiosity over credential.

Keketso Kgomosotho (artist name Roomy) is a human rights attorney, multi-disciplinary scholar and artist from Johannesburg, South Africa. He is currently completing his PhD from the University of Vienna, where his research focuses on intelligence, reason and rationality in Machine Learning systems.

His artistic practice ranges from digital art, photography, music, paint, and poetry. His practice is distinguished by a conceptual curiosity about Being, existence and consciousness, mediated through a pluralistic, multi-medium and multi-modal exploration and offering. His pronouns are he/they.