Naadira Patel
Naadira Patel is a Johannesburg based curator and designer whose practice focuses on contemporary visual culture, a critical engagement with aesthetics and spatial politics, and exploring memory and archiving practices in art and architecture. She is the founder of softwork—a multidisciplinary curatorial and design practice dedicated to intersectional, collaborative, and experimental publication and design approaches to artistic, cultural, architectural, feminist and social justice work. Her practice takes form through exhibitions, installations, site-specific interventions, publication design and public programming.
She is part of the international artist collective Imperfect Futures1 and is on the editorial team of […] Ellipses Journal for Creative Research2. Naadira holds a research MA in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam and has lectured at the Wits School of Arts and the UJ Graduate School of Architecture. Her work includes projects with Wolff Architects, African Centre for Cities, Canadian Centre for Architecture, African Futures Institute, La Biennale di Venezia, Zeitz MOCAA, JCAF, and feminist networks globally.
Notable recent projects include Die Zukunft ist Jetzt on show earlier this year at the Spreepark Art Space in Berlin; Assembling Lines at Spier Light Art (2024); Johannesburg Lasts, a Special Issue of Ellipses Journal for Creative Research (2021); Fugitive Archives: A Sourcebook for Centring Africa in Histories of Architecture (2023) with the Canadian Centre for Architecture; and the publication Tectonic Shifts with Wolff Architects.
Naadira has worked on two previous iterations of the Venice Biennale, in 2024 as the design lead for Quiet Ground, the South African Pavilion at the Venice Biennale; and in 2023 working within the curatorial and design team of the 18th Biennale Architettura, curated by Lesley Lokko, under the theme The Laboratory of the Future.