Kolawole Gbolahan Cornelius

Kolawole Gbolahan (aka Kola) is a Nigerian by birth who resides in Cape Town, South Africa. He is a Mellon scholar with an MA in Music and is currently a PhD candidate at the College of Music, University of Cape Town. His work explores ideas around the redefinition of musical instruments and how these culturally symbolic materials should be conceptualised as objects beyond objects. The work considers how the naming of a space makes it a place, the politics of access to these places and how both the naming and the politics inform the knowledge such spaces hold. He explores and argues for these ideas in his ongoing Doctorate thesis, "An Applied Ethnomusicological Approach To The Curatorial Process Of  Musical Instrument Housed in the Kirby Collection".

Beyond his academic pursuit, he is a multi-instrumentalist, creative space holder, vinyl collector/vinyl DJ and creative writer. He has shared creative works and performance spaces with diverse music projects and creative academics such as Mandla Mbothwe, Marlon Swai, Dizu Plaatjies and the UCT Symphony Orchestra. In 2016, he founded a poetic band, Sounds & Words, and in 2019 he was invited with a cohort of other academics from UCT to present at an international symposium entitled "Art  Anthropology and Beyond" held at the University of Kobe in Japan - a collaboration that led him co-authoring a book, "Resilience". In 2021, he became a co-founder of THE COMMONS, a cultural institution founded on the ideas of community and creative collaboration that also acts as a vibrant co-working cafe and events space in the heart of Muizenberg, Cape Town.