To Protect These Fragile Things

Clive van den Berg

Clive van den Berg (b. 1956, Luanshya, Zambia) is a Johannesburg-based artist, curator and designer who has focused on pioneering the insertion of queer perspectives into the larger rewrite of South African history throughout the course of his prolific forty-year career. Van den Berg has produced a range of works spanning a variety of mediums delve into the porous nature of human existence and the landscapes we inhabit, creating a profound commentary on vulnerability, memory, and the intersection of personal and collective histories.

Van den Berg’s retrospective, titled Porous, took place at the Wits Art Museum in August 2024, and was accompanied by a major new book published by Skira.

In his paintings, he delves into the porous nature of land, acting as a vessel for lived experiences and unearthing unresolved layers beneath its surface. Within Van den Berg’s practice, the landscapes serve as a departure point, transcending physicality to evoke a haunting absence that guide viewers through imagined topographies. Van den Berg’s sculptural practice is equally captivating, focusing on the male form and the symbolic resonance of skin to explore themes of vulnerability and exposure. Through this vulnerability, he challenges traditional notions of masculinity and brings to light the ever-present spectre of mortality. His work serves as a poignant meditation on love, loss, and resilience.

His public projects have included the artworks for landmark Northern Cape Legislature and, since he has joined the trace team, museum projects for the Nelson Mandela Foundation, Constitution Hill, Freedom Park, the Workers Museum, The Holocaust and Genocide Centre and many other projects.

Solo exhibitions include: Porous, Wits Art Museum (2024); Remembering, a survey exhibition of paintings, prints and sculptures, Kwa-Zulu Natal Society of Art Gallery, Durban (2021); Personal Affects, Museum of African Art, New York (2005).

Major curated exhibitions include: If You Look Hard Enough, You Can See Our Future: Selections of Contemporary South African Art from the Nando’s Art Collection, The African American Museum of Dallas, Dallas (2023); Breaking Down the Walls: 150 years of Art Collecting, Iziko SANG, Cape Town (2023); Screening of Memorials Without Facts: Men Loving, São Paulo Museum of Art, São Paulo (2018); Earth Matters: Lands as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington D.C. (2013-2014).

Collections include: El Espacio 23, Miami; Amant Foundation, New York; A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town; Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg; Spier Arts Trust, London; Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Smithsonian Museum of African Art, Washington DC and Video Brasil, Sao Paulo.

Van den Berg lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

William Kentridge

William Kentridge (b. 1955, Johannesburg, South Africa) is internationally acclaimed for his drawings, films, theatre and opera productions.

In 2024, in Venice, Kentridge premiered a new nine-episode video series SELF-PORTRAIT AS A COFFEE-POT – a site-specific installation curated by long-time collaborator and curator Carolyn Christov Bakargiev at the Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation. Folowing this, in October, MUBI presented: William Kentridge’s ‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot’ Premiere in New York.

In conjunction with the world premiere of his newly commissioned opera The Great Yes, The Great No, which debuted at LUMA Arles in July 2024, the solo exhibition Je n’attends plus (I’m Not Waiting Any Longer) presents a collection of major works, some of which had not been seen in Europe before.

Kentridge’s largest UK survey to date was held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2022. An iteration of Kentridge’s Royal Academy survey opened at the Taipei Museum of Fine Arts in May 2024. In the same year Kentridge opened another major survey exhibition, In Praise of Shadows, at The Broad, Los Angeles. In 2023, this exhibition travelled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Kentridge’s work has been seen in museums across the globe since the 1990s, including the Luma Foundation, France (2024); Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation, Venice (2024); Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2024); Museum of Modern Art, New York (1999, 2005, 2010); Albertina Museum, Vienna (2010); Musée du Louvre, Paris (2010); National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid (2015); Kunstmuseum Basel (2019); Norval Foundation, Cape Town (2019). The artist has also participated in biennale’s including Documenta in Kassel (2012, 2002, 1997) and the Venice Biennale (2015, 2013, 2005, 1999, 1993).

Collections include: MoMA, New York; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; Guggenheim, Abu Dhabi and Zeitz MoCAA, Cape Town.

Kentridge lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Remy Jungerman

Remy Jungerman (b. 1959, Moengo, Suriname) explores the intersection of pattern and symbol in Surinamese Maroon culture, the larger African diaspora, and 20th century Modernism. Placing fragments of Maroon textiles and other materials found in the African diaspora—the kaolin clay used in several religious traditions or the nails featured in Nkisi Nkondi power sculpture—in direct contact with materials and imagery drawn from more “established” art traditions, Jungerman presents a peripheral vision that enriches our perspective on art history.

In 2022 , Jungerman received the A.H. Heineken Prize for Art, the biggest visual art prize in the Netherlands. From November 20, 2021 – April 10, 2022 he was the subject of a career survey show at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, titled Remy Jungerman: Behind the Forest. In 2019, he represented the Netherlands at the 58th Venice Biennale. In 2017 he was nominated for the Black Achievement Award in The Netherlands. In 2008, he received the Fritschy Culture Award from the Museum het Domein, Sittard, The Netherlands.

Jungerman is co-founder and curator of the Wakaman Project, drawing Lines – connecting dots. Wakaman, which means “walking man,” was born out of a desire to examine the position of visual artists of Surinamese origin and to raise their profile(s) on the international stage. His first book, Remy Jungerman. Where the River Runs, published by Jap Sam Books in 2019, won the 2019 50books | 50covers design award from the AIGA in the US and has received two 2019 30 Best Dutch Book Designs awards (as per a student jury from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam).

Institutional exhibitions and biennales include: Remy Jungerman: Behind the Forest, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2021-2022); Mondrian Moves, Kunstmuseum, The Hague, Netherlands (2022); 58th Venice Biennial, Dutch Pavilion, Venice (2019); KABRA. Descendants Exchange, Kunstverenging Diepenheim, Netherlands (2013); Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art, Brooklyn Museum, New York (2007).

Group exhibitions include: Spirit Levels, CCA Glasgow, Scotland (2014); Who More Sci-Fi Than Us?, Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, Netherlands (2012); Positions, De Hal, Paramaribo, Suriname (2011).

Solo exhibitions include: Still Waters, Goodman Gallery Johannesburg (2024); Fault Lines, Goodman Gallery, London (2022).

Jungerman lives and works between Amsterdam and New York

Walter Oltmann

Walter Oltmann (b. 1960, Rustenburg, North-West Province, South Africa) has an extensive record of creative work produced since the early 1980s, including a number of public commissions. Since the 1980s, he has developed an interest in the relationship between fine art and craft. In his own practice he employs hand-fabricated processes of making and has researched wire craft traditions in southern Africa. In his works, Oltmann makes connections to domestic textile practices and explores such forms of making in evoking fragility and the passage of time. He often combines aspects of decorative ornament with subject matter that seems somewhat contradictory or disturbing in relation to handcrafted embellishment. His sculptural works are executed by way of weaving in wire and using handcrafting methods that reference African and Western traditions of weaving. He is deeply interested in the influence of craft traditions in contemporary South African art.

He obtained a BA Fine Arts degree from the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg (1981), and an MA Fine Arts degree (1985) and PhD in Fine Arts degree (2017) from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg – where he worked as a Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor in Fine Arts.

In 2001, Oltmann was awarded the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Arts. His solo exhibition which followed travelled throughout South Africa. In 2014, the Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg hosted his solo show In the Weave which profiled three decades of the artist’s work.

Oltmann received the Claire & Edoardo Villa Will Trust’s Extraordinary Award for Sculpture for 2022, enabling him to produce an extensive body of work, undertaken in the Villa-Legodi workshop at NIROX Sculpture Park where the works were also publicly shown. A book on his work titled In Time will be published shortly.

In his PhD thesis titled In The Weave: Textile-based Modes of Making and the Vocabulary of Handcraft in Selected Contemporary Artworks from South Africa, Oltmann examines how and to what ends contemporary artists working in South Africa have chosen to engage in practices that are common to textile-based handcraft traditions of weaving, stitching and tying. His focus is on how these artists have understood manual work and its philosophy, and how conceptualization in their creative practice is accessed through the physical act of repetitive making by hand, based particularly on those traditional textile craft practices associated with weaving.

Collections include: Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, Norval Foundation, Cape Town and the Seattle Art Museum, Washington.

Oltmann lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Laura Lima

Laura Lima’s (b. 1971, Governador Valadares, Minas Gerais, Brazil) practice employs a variety of media often incorporating living organisms and actions that are performed for long periods of time, to explore ways in which human behaviour alters our perception of the everyday.
Since letting a cow loose on Ipanema Beach in the mid-1990s, Lima has continued to present a body of work consisting of what she sometimes describes as ‘images’. Consistently escaping easy classification, Laura Lima’s ‘images’ are ‘neither performance nor installation nor cinema’, but rather attempts to visually link, in concrete reality, a personal glossary that the artist has worked and reworked throughout the more than twenty years of her career. Another component of Lima’s work relates to the notion of ornamental philosophy. Her work seeks to propose new understandings of accepted definitions and concepts, destabilising and subverting what is taken for granted.

In 2023, ‘Laura Lima: Balè Literal’, a major solo exhibition was held at MACBA, which will tour to MAM Rio de Janeiro in May 2025. A dedicated publication is due to be published later in the year by Cobogó.

Lima was the recipient of the Bonnefanten Award for Contemporary Art (BACA), in 2014, and the Marcantonio Vilaça Award in 2006. The artist was also nominated for the Francophone Award in 2011 and the Han Nefkens Award in 2012. In 2003, Lima co-founded A Gentil Carioca together with Ernesto Neto and Marcio Botner, a gallery headed by artists in Rio de Janeiro, where she still serves as a board member.

Solo exhibitions include: How to Eat the Sun and Moon, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2024); Laura Lima: Balè Literal, MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2023); Taylor Shop, Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo (2018); Cavalo come Re’, Prada Foundation, Milan (2018); The Inverse, ICA Miami (2016); Ágrafo, Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo (2015); El Mago Desnudo, MAMBA Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (2015); The Naked Magicien, National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen (2015) and Bonnierskonsthall, Stockholm (2014); The fifth floor, Laureate Bonnefanten, Maastricht (2014); The Abstraction, Lilith Performance Studio, Malmö (2014); Bar/Restaurante, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2013); Casa França Brasil, Rio de Janeiro (2011).

Biennales and group exhibitions include: Witch Hunt, at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2021); Busan Biennial (2018); Sharjah Biennial (2019); Por aqui é tudo novo, Instituto Inhotim, Brumadinho (2016); Trienal de Aichi, Toyohashi (2016); Performa 15, New York (2015); 15 Rooms, Long Museum, Shanghai (2015); Encruzilhada, Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro (2015); 140 Caracteres, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (2014); Por amor a la disidencia, MUAC Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Cidade do México (2013); Circuitos Cruzados – Centre Pompidou meets MAM, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (2013); Ruhrtriennale, Essen (2012); 11a Bienal de Lyon (2011).

Collections include: CACI Centro de Arte Contemporânea Inhotim, Brazil; MAM Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Brazil; Bonniers Konsthall, Sweden; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Switzerland; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo.

Lima lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Lindokuhle Sobekwa

Lindokuhle Sobekwa (b. 1995 in Katlehong, Johannesburg) is a South African photographer. He was introduced to photography in 2012, through the Of Soul and Joy Project in Buhlebuzile High School in Thokoza township, where his photography mentors included Bieke Depoorter, Cyprien Clément-Delmas, Thabiso Sekgala, Tjorven Bruyneel and Kutlwano Moagi.

In 2024, Sobekwa presented solo show at the Johannesburg Art Gallery titled Umkhondo: Going Deeper, following his 2023 FNB Art Prize Award.

In 2023, Sobekwa was awarded the inaugural John Kobal Foundation Fellowship. Maintaining the scrapbook aesthetic of the handmade edition for his first photobook, I carry Her photo with Me, a photographic search for answers about the disappearance of his sister Ziyanda, was published in 2024.

In 2022, he opened his first museum show at Huis Marseille (Amsterdam), featuring the body of work Umkhondo. Tracing Memory, as part of the summer program The Beauty of the World So Heavy. His handmade photobook, I carry Her photo with Me, was included in African Cosmologies at the FotoFest Biennial Houston (2020), curated by Mark Sealy.

In 2021, he completed a residency at A4 Foundation in Cape Town, which culminated in a two-person exhibition with Mikhael Subotzky titled Tell It to the Mountains. He is also currently working on a collaborative project with French Photographer Cyprien Clément-Delmas about the community of Daleside in South Africa. This series was published by Gost in 2021 and has been supported by the Rubis Mécénat Foundation.

Sobekwa’s work has been exhibited in South Africa, Iran, Norway, the US and the Netherlands. His breakout photo series Nyaope: ‘Everything you do my Boss, will do’ was published in the Mail & Guardian (South Africa) in 2014 and his work was featured in Vice magazine and the Standaard in the same year. He completed the foundation course at Market Photo Workshop and in 2017, Sobekwa was selected by the Magnum Foundation as a fellow in the renowned Photography and Social Justice program.

Sobekwa lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

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.