Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi
Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi works across painting, performance, and collaborative engagement. Her practice draws on both personal biography and collective memory to trace the afterlives of imperial histories and their imprint on identity, belonging, and social structure.

Alternating between solitary studio work and participatory formats, Nkosi investigates how political realities shape everyday experience. Her paintings often adopt a restrained visual language — calm surfaces that carry the weight of inherited conflict. Themes of power, resistance, and futurity run through her work, not as motifs, but as conditions to be negotiated.

Portia Zvavahera
Portia Zvavahera’s practice navigates the liminal spaces between the ancestral, extraterrestrial, schizophrenic, and divine. Her work interrogates themes of condemnation, confession, salvation, and rebirth, exploring spirituality and religion in postcolonial Africa. Using oils, wax, and silk screening on large canvases, she layers gestural ink washes with intricate, intentional linework to conjure otherworldly figures and their ethereal realms.

Her figures are not fixed subjects but manifestations of inner states: guilt, desire, rupture, release. What emerges is a theology of feeling — not systematized, but sensed. Zvavahera paints as if in dialogue with spirits that resist translation.

Donna Kukama
donna Kukama works across performance, sound, video, text, and installation — with a practice defined as much by what is seen as by what resists visibility. In her paintings and spatial works, she uses physical materials such as earth, oil pastel, graphite, and everyday objects. But just as deliberately, she names elements like “courage,” “rhythm,” or “memories” as materials — not metaphorically, but as integral parts of the work.

Her gestures are often temporary, participatory, and charged with political intent. Whether through subtle disruptions or poetic insertions, Kukama challenges how history is recorded — and who gets to speak it. She exposes the structural violence embedded in the ordinary and transforms sites of silence into spaces of insistence, mourning, and reimagining. Her work doesn’t just remember — it refuses to forget.

Igshaan Adams
Igshaan Adams weaves with more than thread — he weaves with memory, with contradiction, with longing. Raised in Bonteheuwel, his materials echo the textures of daily life: beads, wire, nylon, cloth. But his real medium is transformation.

Across tapestries, sculptures, and immersive environments, Adams explores the friction between race, sexuality, and Islam. His works are layered — literally and symbolically — often undone as much as they are constructed. They ask what it means to inherit a body, a belief, a border. And what it takes to unravel them.

Lindokuhle Sobekwa
To Lindokuhle Sobekwa, photography is not just a medium of documentation, but one of invocation. His images, often suspended between installation and performance, bring absent presences into the frame — people, places, and moments that linger just beyond the visible.

Drawing on a lineage of South African documentary photography, Sobekwa builds a conceptual practice rooted in patience, observation, and return. His camera slows things down. It asks: What do we miss when we think we’ve already seen?

Dada Khanyisa
Scenes from shared flats, weekend rituals, group chats and city sidewalks — these are the environments Dada Khanyisa assembles. Their work moves across painting, sculpture, and found-object installation to tell stories that are both intimate and socially coded.

More than observation, their practice is participation. Through layered, hyper-detailed compositions, Khanyisa captures how identity is negotiated in real time: through gesture, through style, through presence. These are portraits of contemporary life — unfiltered, communal, precise.

Robin Rhode
Robin Rhode transforms urban walls into stages for visual performance. Working with drawing, photography, animation, and public intervention, his art unfolds as a sequence of choreographed gestures — often performed directly onto and against city walls.

Raised in Johannesburg and now based in Berlin, Rhode’s early works emerged from post-apartheid South Africa and remain shaped by questions of identity, access, and spatial politics. Using minimal materials — chalk, charcoal, spray paint — he constructs narratives that blend street culture with formal rigor. Whether sketching a piano or a bicycle in motion, his protagonists act out systems of constraint and creativity, turning line into action and repetition into resistance.