Donna Kukama

Donna Kukama has exhibited and presented performances at several notable institutions and museums, including the Nottingham Contemporary in Nottingham, Kunsthal KaDe in Amersfoort, Padiglione de'Arte Contemporanea Milano in Milan, South African National Gallery in Cape Town, Museum of Modern Art in Antwerp, Tate Modern in London, nGbK in Berlin, and the New Museum in New York. She has participated in the 57th Belgrade Biennale; 12th Lyon Biennale; the 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art; 32nd Bienal de São Paulo; 8th Berlin Biennale (as CHR); the 10th Berlin Biennale's public program, and the South African Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale. Kukama was the 2014 recipient of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Performance Art and received a nomination for the MTN New Contemporaries Award (2010) and the Visible Award (as NON-NON Collective) in 2011. She was a guest professor at HBK Braunschweig in Germany (2019-2020) and has been a lecturer at the Wits School of Arts in Johannesburg since 2011. She currently lives between Berlin and Johannesburg.

Overarching praxis statement:

My practice engages performance art as a tool for creative research, often resulting in manipulations of simple visual and sensory experiences that also blur the distinctions between reality and fiction. I use performance as a strategy that allows me to invent as well as to apply methods that are outside of what is predictable or expected, and as a medium of resistance against already established 'ways of doing'. The resulting work often takes on experimental forms that deliberately apply 'undisciplined' methods as a strategy for inserting my voice and presence in public, as a form of ‘historical record’. I weave unrecorded histories with fictional narratives and personal stories to present 'living monuments' within larger sociopolitical settings. These often fragile and ephemeral moments of encounter are to be understood as gestures of poetry with political intent, carrying with them the weight to destabilize existing canons regarding the ways we memorialize or write histories.

Current art and/or research interest:

I’m exhausted of being the ‘rule-breaker’, and I want to create spaces where I am the ever-changing ‘rule of law’. What if, in the near future, there existed a living book; a book about not- books-as-books; a history book as an archaeology of sites; as a re-orchestration of past events in the present tense; a recovery of unwritten existences, and a not-yet-known set of vocabularies that speak in multiple tenses? My creative research begins with the creation of a History Book that is not limited to bound paper with written text. It writes itself through shifting between storytelling, public announcements, noise, monuments, and proposed ‘ways of existing’, in a search for vocabularies of writing that have always existed, but remain ‘marginalized’. It considers existence as a tool for writing, and applies ephemerality as a grammar that speaks for invisibilities (plural), often resulting in performances, texts, public interventions, buried objects, soundings, drawings, or nothing. The previous sixfteen chapters of the book have mostly revisited sites of violence (physical/discursive, personal/public) directed at and experienced by bodies that do not occupy a “centre stage” in conventional History books. The overall intention of the book is not to relive the past, but rather to allow gaps for unpredictable "comebacks" in the present day.

More about the artist:
https://donnakukama.wordpress.com/2020/09/17/ways-of-remembering-existing-performance-art-as-memory-work/

https://vimeo.com/showcase/4328538 (password available at request)