Donna Kukama
“I am currently working on a History Book whose chapters ‘happen’ in various sites across the world. Each of the chapters is a site-specific response to past, present, and future concerns of not only historically erased bodies, but also moments in history that may need revisiting. The book takes on a form that is not limited to bound paper with written text, rather, it shifts between storytelling, public announcements, noise, monuments, and proposed ways of existing. The previous thirteen chapters of the book have mostly revisited sites of violence (physical/discursive, personal/public) directed at and experienced by marginalized bodies. For the Belgrade Biennale, I will be producing a chapter that maps, through resilient plants, the architectural scars that remain in the city of Belgrade after having historically been destroyed over 44 times. The work will be developed site-specifically during a short research period leading up to the Biennale. The overall intention of the book is not to relive the past, but rather to allow gaps for ‘comebacks’ in the present day; gaps that are informed by the past and enable contradicting futures.”
–– Donna Kukama
Donna Kukama is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is informed by performance-based research processes. Her work presents gestures of unlearning, often presenting institutions, book chapters, monuments, or historical archives that are as real as they are fictitious. Through performance, video, sound, texts, and non-monuments, her work questions the way in which histories are narrated, as well as how value systems are constructed, often resisting established “ways of doing.”
Kukama has presented solo performances at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa; the Museum of Modern Art in Antwerp, Belgium; the New Museum in New York; and she participated in the 12th Biennale de Lyon, France; the 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art; the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo. She was recently one of the participants of the small artists’ group invited to launch the 10th Berlin Biennale’s public program, and she also took part in the South African Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale. Kukama is also a member of the Center for Historical Reenactments (CHR – “founded 2010. died 2012. haunted 2013. exorcised 2014. Musemified 2017”).
