donna Kukama: Ways-of-Remembering-Existing

Wits Art Museum announces 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.

The title, Ways-of-Remembering-Existing, is rooted in Kukama’s ongoing PhD creative research which critiques existing narratives of history and traditional modes of storytelling. Through her practice, Kukama proposes texts – written with and through time, breath, and memory – and objects whose grammar is opacity and ephemerality.

Amongst the other works in the exhibition, Kukama will also present aspects of a project begun in 2015: a history book for those who absolutely need to be remembered. The Book was originally conceived as a tool for questioning and rethinking memorials, monuments, and national commemorations within the South African landscape, and has since presented chapters in a range of other contexts. Its beginning chapters physically revisited sites of violence (physical/discursive, personal/public) directed at and experienced by socially, structurally, and economically marginalised bodies. Its current and final chapters are focused on writing landscapes for healing, joy, and magic into reality. In this ongoing work, the artist’s conception of written histories is not limited to the physical form of bound paper with written text, but rather shifts through rumour, memory, performance, drawing, objects, installation, and sound.

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