Galerie Tschudi

donna Kukama

Work by donna Kukama

Biography

b. 1981, Mafikeng (ZA)

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donna Kukama is a South African interdisciplinary artist whose practice merges various media by using performance as a tool for artistic research. Moving across performance, video, painting, and installation, her practice presents a thought-provoking and socially engaged art through unconventional modes of storytelling to destabilize existing historical metanarratives and how we look at reality. With her ongoing work, Kukama opens up new ways of inhabiting space, creating, and conceiving the world. To counter the predictable, she thinks beyond the constraints of identity to uncover its complexities, layers, and contradictions while actively opening up possibilities for different narratives and less-told histories to exist. Therefore, her work takes on an experimental, undisciplined, inventive, and provoking form. Whether written, drawn, performed, or sculptural, her work can be understood as gestures of poetry that speak to us about time and memory while presenting alternate realities where both the material and immaterial coexist as materials to engage erasures within the contemporary history of South Africa and beyond.

Selected Works

Work by donna Kukama

1/5

donna Kukama

in a sudden stir, all the bitter-ladies gathered to sing as they discovered the sweet taste of multiple refusals, 2020

black acrylic, revolutions, graphite, liquid chalk on canvas,
96.5 × 61.5 cm,
Courtesy of blank projects, Cape Town
DK/P 5

Work by donna Kukama

2/5

donna Kukama

Shadows of fallen fists fighting for fake traumas, 2020

Graphite, oil pastel, acrylic and lies on canvas,
133 × 100 × 5 cm,
Courtesy of blank projects, Cape Town
DK/P 6

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Work by donna Kukama

3/5

donna Kukama

we do not expect you to believe in us, 2020

black acrylic, faithlessness, graphite, solid truth, liquid chalk on canvas,
200 × 170 cm ,
Courtesy of blank projects, Cape Town
DK/P 3

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Work by donna Kukama

4/5

donna Kukama

The Swing (After after Fragonard), 2009 Video, duration 4 min 55 sec,

Courtesy of blank projects, Cape Town

Work by donna Kukama

5/5

donna Kukama

Not Yet (And Nobody Knows Why Not), 2008 Video, duration 15 min 10 sec

Edition 2/3 + 1AP
Courtesy of blank projects, Cape Town

Selected Press

Evening Standard

Frieze Art Fair 2017: Donna Kukama on why she’s selling medicinal plants at an art fair

Ben Luke

29 September 2017

As the Evening Standard teams up with Frieze for next week’s art bonanza, Ben Luke meets performance artist and star attraction Donna Kukama.

Art Africa Magazine

donna Kukama at Wits Art Museum

24 August 2022

Wits Art Museum has announced ‘Ways-of-Remembering-Existing’, a solo exhibition by donna Kukama. The exhibition spans the various aspects of Kukama’s practice
to include performance, works on canvas, sculptural objects, video and a site-specific installation.

ArtThrob

ghouls, guts, dust: donna Kukama’s «Ways-of-Remembering-Existing»

6 November 2022

A review by Thuli Gamedze on the 6th of November 2022.

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