The artwork depicted in the image appears to be a black and white photographic work, capturing a performance or installation piece. The composition features a stark, minimalist setting with a person standing at a podium or platform, surrounded by a darkened, abstract background. The prominent elements are the figure, the podium, and the projected drawing or illustration on the wall behind the figure. The artistic style suggests an avant-garde or experimental approach, likely exploring themes of identity, expression, or the relationship between the individual and the larger context. The overall impression conveys a sense of contemplation, introspection, and the blending of physical and conceptual elements within the artistic experience. ...
Donna Kukama is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice engages performance art as a tool for creative research. Her work presents institutions, monuments, gestures of protest, rumors, and fleeting moments that are as real as they are fictitious. Shifting between performance, video, text, sound, and multimedia installations, her practice takes on a form that is experimental, applying methods that are deliberately undisciplined. She uses performance as a strategy that allows her to invent as well as to apply methods that are outside the canon of what is predictable or expected. She questions how histories are narrated and subverts how value systems are constructed, often centering methods perspectives that originate from the Global South. Through her practice, she weaves major with minor aspects of histories, introducing fragile and brief moments of ‘strangeness’ within sociopolitical settings. Her performances are to be understood as gestures of poetry with a political intent and an urgent need to destabilize existing canons regarding the ways we look at reality. For Kukama, performance becomes a strategy for inserting foreign ‘undocumented’ voices and presences into history by occupying sites and territories that remember less-told stories. ...
Based in a 360 sqm gallery in Woodstock, Cape Town, blank was founded by Jonathan Garnham as a project space in 2005 and transitioned into a commercial gallery during 2012. The gallery represents emerging and increasingly established artists from the region in a critically engaged programme that emphasises contemporaneity, with a focus on concept and abstraction in the African context. With an exhibition programme that has a reputation for shaping the discourse around contemporary art in South(ern) Africa, and participation in prominent local and international art fairs, we seek to place our artists' work in a wide range of private and institutional collections. In addition, blank continues to promote the visual arts in our community through ongoing projects that support the sector. ...
