donna Kukama: I Breathe, You Breathe

I Breathe, You Breathe brings together donna Kukama’s sound, videos, paintings, drawings, sculptures, and performance documentation spanning two decades of her artistic practice, along with a newly commissioned mural and performances that will take place throughout the exhibition period. Approaching history as a living and breathing body, donna invites us to breathe in the company of lesser-known stories, reimagine what it means to write a historical text, and to fluidly inhabit spaces of contradiction, plurality, and becoming, reflecting and mirroring the messiness of history.

donna is an interdisciplinary artist and creative researcher whose practice is grounded in breath as a grammar for storytelling and memory work. Known for her performance practice, her continued engagement with the medium, alongside its translations and transmutations into other forms, remains a tool to invent and reimagine the conventions and institutions of art, historical writing, and monument-making.

Aligning with donna’s approach to engaging with history, the exhibition is intentionally unchronological and layered, echoing her multiplicity and non-linear storytelling methods that weave and intertwine histories, rumors, gossip, and poetic ruptures into socio-political contexts. In her drawings and paintings, she rhythmically and repetitively renders written language obsolete, leaning instead toward gestural and invisibilized forms of knowledge-making “go kgapha” from her maternal lineage. Her sculptural works, which document moments in her performances, become miniature monuments drawn from the earth and rendered in clay, copper, and steel. In her sound works, the presence of breath, the human voice, the wind, and oceans transform the exhibition into a living archive of survival, resistance, and reclamation.

I Breathe, You Breathe is donna Kukama’s first solo exhibition in the Netherlands. The exhibition is supported by Ammodo. With thanks to blank projects, Galerie Tschudi, and private collectors across Europe.