Donna Kukama – come and celebrate her art
I first met Donna Kukama just over a year ago through a mutual friend, she was so excited about moving to Switzerland to do her Masters that one couldnt help but be caught up in her bubbly enthusiasm for life… Speaking to her about ART showed a commited and integrity-based artist, searching for answers and always looking ahead. We’re delighted that SAartsEmerging are featuring her at th…
eir launch and even more so that the launch takes place in Melville – our favourite hang-out.
SAartsEmerging launches this month with a feature on Donna Kukama. In celebration, we’ve planned a cash bar hootenanny for emerging artists and art appreciators, alike:
9 February, 2006
Berlin Bar in Johannesburg, South Africa
7th street, Melville (across and down from Xai Xai)
18:30ish til whenever
Features a site-specific installation by our own Bronwyn Lace!
SAartsEmerging.org is dedicated to featuring emerging South African artists, curators and arts personalities who are not generally, or have not yet been, written about – but who should be. SAartsEmerging lacks any pretense of objectivity, and preference is not only given to Gauteng locals and friends, but also to early-career non-stars working conceptually, and across disciplines.
Hope to see you at the party!
Donna Kukama
Donna Kukama has been on a trajectory of exploring and performing the boundaries between inside / outside, flesh / self, and the relations and investments we have in objects and social status. She is currently studying for her Master of Arts in Sierre, Switzerland; we had a discussion about her work mid-last year.
At that time, Kukama was struggling against being defined by her peers – she was “an emerging, black, female, South African artist,” full stop. Feisty and considerate, she was attempting to rebel against what she called a mis/use of identity politics in order to circumvent the politics of the art world. Ironically, in her quest to break out of a boxed in and imputed singularity, Kukama was putting herself smack in the middle of this very dialogue – sometimes with very successful and beautiful interrogations of body and character, and sometimes with works that are very different from what she intended. Rather than trying to “unfold the spaces of her gendered and raced body, to find the stigmas of social inscription,”1 Kukama explored and shared an intimacy of personal experience, simultaneously daring her onlookers to find the lack and the excess, of confinement and of humanness.
