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Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
Sunshine for those of us who live through the holes in your concrete
An inaugural lecture by donna kukama, new professor of contemporary art / global south at KHM. Welcome by the rector Prof. Mathias Antlfinger
Mittwoch, 31. Mai 2023, 19 Uhr, Aula
Filzengraben 2, 50676 Köln, Eintritt frei
South-African-born interdisciplinary artist and professor Donna Kukama will present her inaugural public lecture at KHM. The lecture will merge Kukama’s ongoing doctoral research with previous and current work, which addresses questions of knowledge production and memory work. In her presentation, Kukama will unsettle how, and whose histories are told while applying forms of producing knowledge that are not necessarily harvested within academia. Kukama’s lecture is a universe made up of dreams, rituals, and forms of alchemy that center the body as an ancestral archive, and memory and breath as tools for writing history.
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. Kukama questions how histories are narrated and subverts how value systems are constructed, instead centering methods and perspectives that originate outside of the West. 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 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.
Kukama has exhibited and presented performances at various international institutions and museums such as the South London Gallery in London; Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto; Tate Modern in London; Nottingham Contemporary in Nottingham; De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill On Sea; Arnolfini in Bristol; Padiglione de Arte Contemporanea Milano in Milan; South African National Gallery in Cape Town; Museum of Modern Art in Antwerp; nGbK in Berlin; Musée - Frac Occitanie Toulouse in Toulouse and the New Museum in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include 'Ways-of-Remembering-Existing' at Wits Art Museum in Johannesburg from August to November 2022, 'mooood' at blank projects in Cape Town from October to November 2019, and ‘t r a n s c e n d e n c e’, an upcoming solo at Galerie Tschudi in Zuoz, Switzerland in 2023.
Kukama has also taken part in several international exhibitions, including, among others, the 8th Biennial of Painting; 10th Berlin Biennale; the 57th Belgrade Biennale; 12th Lyon Biennale; the 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art; 3rd New Museum Triennale; 32nd Bienal de São Paulo and 8th Berlin Biennale and the 55th Venice Biennale as part of the South African Pavilion. She was awarded the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Performance Art in 2014, and the Wyss Scholarship at ECAV, Switzerland in 2005. From 2010 until 2016, together with fellow artist Kemang Wa Lehulere and curator Gabi Ngcobo, Kukama was involved with the collective Centre for Historical Re-enactments, a collaborative platform based in Johannesburg.
Kukama holds a Postgraduate Degree in MAPS (Masters of Arts in the Public Sphere) from the Ecole Cantonale d’Art du Valais in Sierre, Switzerland, and currently lives and works in Cologne, where she is since winter semester 22/23 a professor of Contemporary Art with a focus on the Global South at KHM. She is also a research associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg and a PhD candidate in Art & Media at the University of Plymouth, UK.
https://www.khm.de/termine/news.5513.sunshine-for-those-of-us-who-live-through-t...
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