donna Kukama

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.

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.

donna Kukama (b.1981, Mafikeng, South Africa) 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 from Global Majorities beyond 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 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 ‘less documented’ voices and presences into history by occupying sites and territories that remember less-told stories.

Kukama has exhibited and performed at various international institutions and museums including, among others, the South London Gallery in London (2022); Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle (2022); Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto (2022); Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town (2021); Musée - Frac Occitanie Toulouse in Toulouse (2021); FUTURA Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague (2020); De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill On Sea (2019); Arnolfini in Bristol (2019); Nottingham Contemporary in Nottingham (2018); Kunsthal KaDe in Amersfoort (2018); Padiglione de’Arte Contemporanea Milano in Milan (2017); Tate Modern in London (2015); and MhKA in Antwerp (2015). She has been included on several international exhibitions, such as the 57th Belgrade Biennale (2018); 32nd Bienal de São Paulo (2016); the 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2015); 3rd New Museum Triennale (2015); Biennale of Moving Images in Geneva (2014); 12th Lyon Biennale (2013); and the 55th Venice Biennale (2013). In 2014, she was awarded the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Performance Art, and the Wyss Scholarship at ECAV, Switzerland in 2005. She is currently a research associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg. Kukama currently lives and works in Cologne, Germany, where she is a professor of Contemporary Art with a focus on the Global South at the Academy of Media Arts (KHM). Kukama’s work is represented in several notable collections, including the Johannesburg Art Gallery (Johannesburg), Iziko South African National Art Gallery (Cape Town), and Wits Art Museum (Johannesburg).