Fathom | RHE Water Show | March 2021

Kiluanji Kia Henda

Kiluanji Kia Henda (b. 1979, Luanda, Angola) employs a surprising sense of humour in his work, which often homes in on themes of identity, politics, and perceptions of post-colonialism and modernism in Africa. Kia Henda brings a critical edge to his multidisciplinary practice, which incorporates photography, video, and performance. Informed by a background surrounded by photography enthusiasts, Kia Henda’s conceptual-based work has further been sharpened by exposure to music, avant-garde theatre, and collaborations with a collective of emerging artists in Luanda’s art scene. Much of Kia Henda’s work draws on history through the appropriation and manipulation of public spaces and structures, and the different representations that form part of collective memory, in order to produce complex, yet powerful imagery.

Kia Henda has had solo exhibitions in galleries and institutions around the world. His work has featured on biennales in Venice, Dakar, São Paulo and Gwangju as well as major travelling exhibitions such as Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design and The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Hell, Purgatory revisited by Contemporary African Artists. In 2019, Kia Henda’s work was acquired by Tate Modern in London, and he was selected to participate on the Unlimited sector at Art Basel. In 2020, Kia Kenda exhibited at the MAN Museo d’Arte Provincia di Nuoro in Italy, marking his first solo exhibition in a major European museum.

Kia Henda currently lives and works between Luanda and Lisbon.

Alfredo Jaar

Alfredo Jaar (b. 1956, Santiago, Chile) is an artist, architect, and filmmaker who considers social injustices and human suffering through thought-provoking installations. Throughout his career Jaar has used different mediums to create compelling work that examines the way we engage with, and represent humanitarian crises. He is known as one of the most uncompromising, compelling, and innovative artists working today.

Through photography, film and installation he provokes the viewer to question our thought process around how we view the world around us. Jaar has explored significant political and social issues throughout his career, including genocide, the displacement of refugees across borders, and the balance of power between the first and third world.

Jaar’s work has been shown extensively around the world. He has participated in the Biennales of Venice (1986, 2007, 2009, 2013), Sao Paulo (1987, 1989, 2010) as well as Documenta in Kassel (1987, 2002).

Important individual exhibitions include The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1992); Whitechapel, London (1992); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1995); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1994); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome (2005) and The Nederlands Fotomuseum (2019). Major recent surveys of his work have taken place at Musée des Beaux Arts, Lausanne (2007); Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2008); Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlinische Galerie and Neue Gesellschaft fur bildende Kunst e.V., Berlin (2012); Rencontres d’Arles (2013); KIASMA, Helsinki (2014); and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK (2017).

The artist has realised more than seventy public interventions around the world. Over sixty monographic publications have been published about his work. He became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1985 and a MacArthur Fellow in 2000. He was awarded the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2018, and has recently received the prestigious Hasselblad award for 2020.

His work can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum, New York; Art Institute of Chicago and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MOCA and LACMA, Los Angeles; MASP, Museu de Arte de São Paulo; TATE, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centro Reina Sofia, Madrid; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; MAXXI and MACRO, Rome; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlaebeck; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art and Tokushima Modern Art Museum, Japan; M+, Hong Kong; and dozens of institutions and private collections worldwide.

The artist lives and works in New York, USA.

Jeremy Wafer

Jeremy Wafer (b. 1953, Durban, South Africa) works across sculpture, photography, video and drawing, exploring the politics and poetics of place. Rooted in South Africa’s social, cultural and political geography, his work engages issues of land and territory, particularly themes of location, dislocation, possession and dispossession.

Wafer studied at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg (B.A Fine Art, 1979) and at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (B.A. Hons. in Art History 1980, M.A. Fine Art 1987 and PhD, 2017). He has taught in the Fine Art Department of the Technikon Natal, Durban, and at the School of Arts of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where he was appointed Professor of Fine Art in 2011.

Solo exhibitions include: Material Immaterial, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2023); Arc, Goodman Gallery, London (2022); Index, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2017); Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2014); Structure: Avenues and barriers of Power, a retrospective at KZNSA Gallery, Durban (2009).

Group exhibitions include: Centre of Gravity, The Old Soap Works, Bristol (2020); Ampersand, University of Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg (2019); Everywhere but Here, Cite International des Arts, Paris (2017); What remains is Tomorrow, The Pavilion of South Africa at the 56th Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2015); Witness, Linden Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2014); Views of Africa, Smithsonian National Museum of Air and Space, Washington DC. (2013); and 20: Two Decades of South African Sculpture, NIROX Foundation, the Cradle of Humankind, (2010).

Wafer’s work features in the following public collections: the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC; South African National Gallery in Cape Town and the Johannesburg Art Gallery.

Wafer lives and works between London and Johannesburg.

Dor Guez

Dor Guez Munayer’s (b. Jerusalem) practice comprises photography, video, installations, and sculpture. Through multimedia performances, Guez transforms art into a vehicle for storytelling. During a recent performance at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, he examined multi-colonial projections looking at different historical resources. His latest overview, “Catastrophe,” at the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá in 2022, spanned a wide range of works that reflect the artist’s engagement with his communities and the ever-evolving studies of the Mediterranean Basin.

Guez’s work has been displayed in solo exhibitions at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City (2023); Felix Nussbaum Museum, Osnabrück (2023); MAMBO: Museum of Modern Art, Bogota (2022); Kunst im Kreuzgang, Bielefeld (2021); Futura Gallery, Prague, (2020); American Colony Archive, Jerusalem (2019); MAN Museum, Nuoro (2018); the Museum for Islamic Art, Jerusalem (2017); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2016); the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2015) the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Massachusetts (2013); The Mosaic Rooms, A.M Qattan Foundation, Centre for Contemporary Arab Culture & Art, London (2013) and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2010).

Guez’s works are included in public collections such as Tate Modern London, Center Pompidou Paris, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, LACMA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum, The Jewish Museum New York, Rose Art Museum, FRAC collection Marseille, Museum of Modern Art Bogota, and more.

Dor Guez Munayer lives and works between Jaffa and Athens.

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s (b. 1980, Mochudi, Botswana) work alludes to mythology, geology and theories on the nature of the universe. Her work includes imagery that reflects the diverse genealogies of her experience living in different parts of Africa, Southeast Asia, and the U.S. as well as ongoing research in ethnography, ecology, and quantum physics. The artist’s boundary-crossing practice centres Black female identity in the discourse of postcolonialism and neocolonialism, highlighting the contributions of overlooked historical figures while emphasising modes of knowledge and communication beyond the status quo.

In 2024, a major new solo exhibition opened at KM21 Den Haag, including a new large scale diptych painting within an installation that included items from the museum’s furniture collection. Sunstrum also presented her first solo exhibition titled ‘It Will End in Tears’, at a major UK institution, the Barbican Centre’s The Curve. Sunstrum took her life-size wood grain panoramas round the bend of the gallery, building a narrativised sequence with elements of film noir, crime fiction and pure drama.

Recent solo exhibitions include: It Will End In Tears, Barbican London, UK (2024); You’ll be sorry, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa (2023), The Pavillion, London Mithraeum, Bloomberg SPACE, London (2023); All my seven faces, Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati (2019); Michaelis School for the Arts at the University of Cape Town (2018); Interlochen Centre for the Arts, Interlochen (2016).

Group exhibitions and biennales include: Born in Flames: Feminist Futures, The Bronx Museum of the Arts NY, USA (2021); WITNESS: Afro Perspectives from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, El Espacio 23, Miami, USA (2020).

Collections include: Fries Museum, Leeuwarden, Hessel Museum at Bard College, New York, A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town; The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; University of Cape Town, Cape Town; Deutsche Bank Collection, Frankfurt; El Espacio 23, Miami; FRAC des Pays de la Loire Contemporary Collection, Carquefou; University of South Africa (UNISA) Art Collection.

Sunstrum lives and works in The Hague, Netherlands.

Sue Williamson

Sue Williamson (b. 1941, Lichfield, UK) is one of South Africa’s most important contemporary artists. In the 1970s, Williamson started to make work which addressed social change and by the late 1980s she was well known for her series of portraits of women involved in the country’s political struggle, titled A Few South Africans (1980s).

In 2025, a major retrospective of her five-decades long career, titled There’s something I must tell you, will be shown at the Iziko South African National Gallery, following her UK and US institutional exhibitions in 2023 at The Box, Plymouth and The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.

In 1997, Williamson founded www.artthrob.co.za, a leading website on South African contemporary art and the first of its kind in the country. Williamson has also authored two major publications - South African Art Now (2009) and Resistance Art in South Africa (1989).

Williamson has participated in biennales around the world, including the Kochi Muziris Biennale (2019); several Havana Biennales as well as Sydney, Istanbul, Venice and Johannesburg biennales.

Major international solo exhibitions include: Between Memory and Forgetting, The Box, Plymouth, UK (2023); Other Voices, Other Cities, Las Palmas (2023); Can’t Remember, Can’t Forget, Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg (2017); Other Voices, Other Cities, SCAD Museum of Art, Georgia (2015), Messages from the Moat, Den Haag, (2003) and The Last Supper Revisited, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C. (2002).

Group exhibitions include: Tell Me What You Remember, Barnes Foundation (2023); Breaking Down the Walls – 150 years of Collecting Art at Iziko, Iziko South African Museum (2022); RESIST! The 1960s Protests, Photography and Visual Legacy, BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (2018); Women House, La Monnaie de Paris and National Museum for Women in the Arts (Washington D.C) (2017, 2018); Being There, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2017); Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life, International Centre for Photography in New York and the Museum Africa in Johannesburg (2014); The Short Century, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, House of World Cultures, Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and P.S.1 New York (2001-2).

Collections include: the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Pompidou Centre, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C; Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town and the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg. Williamson has authored two books – ‘South African Art Now’ (2009) and ‘Resistance Art in South Africa’ (1989).

Awards and fellowships include: The Living Legends Award (2020), attributed by the South African government’s Department of Sports, Arts and Culture; the University of Johannesburg’s Ellen Kuzwayo Award (2018); the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Creative Arts Fellowship (2011); the Smithsonian’s Visual Artist Research Award Fellowship (2007) and the Lucas Artists Residency Fellowship (2005) from Montalvo Art Center in California.

​Williamson lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.