Winter Show / Joburg / 2010

Hentie van der Merwe

Born in Windhoek, Namibia in 1972. Lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa

Marco Cianfanelli

Marco Cianfanelli was born on 30th November 1970 in Johannesburg.

Thomas Mulcaire

Thomas Mulcaire was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1971. He began a Fine Arts degree at Wits University, and then travelled abroad before returning to complete a BA degree in History of Art and Literature at Wits in 1993. He now lives in Ubatuba, Brazil. Mulcaire’s work takes many different forms and crosses into film, photography, sculpture, and installation. In particular, he has worked on a number of collaborations that interrogate the assumed limits of authorship in relation to the artwork. One such project is the Interpolar Transnational Art Science Constellation (ITASC), which he founded in 2005 with Marko Peljhan.

ITASC is described on their website as ‘a decentralized network of individuals and organisations working collaboratively in the fields of art, engineering and science on the interdisciplinary development and deployment of renewable energy, waste recycling systems and sustainable architecture to enable the production and distribution of open-format, open-source remote field research in Antarctica and the Arctic. ITASC is a lichen-like structure sharing and integrating local knowledge, resources and skills across seven continents in order to symbiotically engage with the air, ocean, earth and space commons.’ In February 2009, Mulcaire, Ntsikelelo Ntshingila, and Pol Taylor installed ICEPAC (the ITASC Catabatic Experimental Platform for Antarctic Culture) at Vesleskarvet Nunatak in the Dronning Maud Land sector of Antarctica, the world’s first mobile polar research base to be powered entirely by solar and wind energy. Such projects illustrate Mulcaire’s interest in various forms of networks – spatial, human, technological, and cellular, as well as his concern with the way in which we inhabit and make use of the limited resources of our planet.

Mulcaire has exhibited at the Saõ Paulo, Sydney, and Ushuaia biennales. He has worked as an exhibitions co-coordinator (notably for the Johannesburg Biennale in 1995), an assistant curator at Documenta, founder and director of the ICA in Cape Town, as well as a curator for projects in Kassel, New York, Saõ Paulo, and Perth. In 2008 and 2009 he exhibited his work at the Goodman Gallery Johannesburg and Cape Town. This year he participates in Unwetter at the Akademie der Kunst in Berlin, CUE at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and Halakasha at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg.

Joël Andrianomearisoa

Joël Andrianomearisoa was born in Antananarivo, Madagascar, in 1977. He lives and works between Antananarivo and Paris. Andrianomearisoa says of his work: ‘The only thing that matters to me is to deal with time. And what frightens me most is never to be on time, to be outdated. My way of answering this challenge is to be permanently against the current’. In his ‘dealing with time’ Andrianomearisoa falls into no clear category: his work crosses boundaries into video, fashion, design, sculpture, photography, performance, and installation. But perhaps his works in paper and textile are most indicative of his larger interests. Black features prominently, especially in his textile works, which hover enticingly between the ephemeral and the permanent. These works are partly sculptured and partly left to the chance and serendipity of the material with which he works. The same may be said of the performance and video works on which he has collaborated.

Andrianomearisoa has participated in a number of group shows, including Africa Remix; Rencontres Africaine de la Photographie in Bamako; the Havana Biennale; Fashion in Motion; the Design Biennale in St Etienne, France; and Africa Now!. His solo shows include Bir Gece, a one-night performance and installation in Istanbul; Habillé – Deshabillé, a performance/video piece in Stockholm and Saint-Brieuc; Bar and Une Histoire in Antananarivo (2004 and 2008 respectively); Black Out in Istanbul; and I don’t know how to begin, I don’t know how it will end in Ghent.

William Kentridge & Marguerite Stephens

Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer was born in the village of Gallipolis, in southeastern Ohio, USA, in 1950. She first visited New York City when she was eleven, and eventually moved there in 1977 when she was accepted into the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. She had studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and at a certain point during her MA there, she began incorporating text into her paintings. She wrote her first Truisms in 1977. In an interview with Diane Waldman in 1989 (published in Jenny Holzer, Guggenheim Museum), Holzer talks about what motivated her decision to begin writing and more or less abandon painting as she had practiced and studied it up to that point: ‘I wanted to see if I could make anything that would be of use to or have some kind of meaning for a general audience, people on their way to lunch who didn’t care anything about art.’ She also says that in incorporating her work into the signage and furniture of a city like New York (she has, over the years, placed work in many other urban spaces all over the world) she didn’t want either complete control of complete chaos, ‘but both there in their extreme forms, not averaged.’ To this end, Holzer has employed every kind of public sign writing to make art that is incorporated into the public architecture of cities.

Holzer has been doing solo and collaborative installations and exhibitions in galleries and urban environments all over the world since 1978, including in New York, Berlin, Venice, Osaka, Lund, Boston, Hamburg, London, Paris, Saõ Paolo, and Seoul. These works have taken the form of LED signs, pastings, posters, light installations, writing on stone, billboards, plaques, graffiti, prints, projections, t-shirts, and tattoos. She is also a painter and printmaker – her canvases are strongly text based – and has published books, essays, and stories. She has done a number of special projects for various cities and these include LED installations, electronic signs, projections, and engravings on benches. Holzer has won several major awards including honorary doctorates, the Leone d’Oro at the Venice Biennale, and the Goslar Emperor Ring.

Patrick Waterhouse

Patrick Waterhouse was born in 1981 in Bath, England. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the Camberwell College of Art and worked for a time with a design agency in London before joining Fabrica to publish a fully illustrated version of Dante’s Inferno. He has been a guest editor of Colors Magazine and art director of the Benetton social campaign, Africa Works. A long-term project has produced a book on the life and work of the Hungarian sociologist Franktof F. Burnsteins, Absolute Truth and Other Possibilities. Waterhouse met Mikhael Subotzky in Italy and the two have been working on the Ponte City project since 2008.

Kara Walker

Kara Walker was born in Stockton, California, in 1969. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Atlanta College of Art, and now lives in New York. Walker is well known for her cut-out silhouettes and films that examine, in particular, race, the history of the Antebellum South in the USA, African-American identity, and representations of black women. These tableaux offer a visual paring down of the history of Africa in America but despite their graphic simplicity they are often replete with violence and action. In an interview for the film series Art:21 Walker comments that ‘A lot of my work has been about the unexpected … wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time. That kind of dilemma, that push and pull, is the underlying turbulence that I bring to each of the pieces that I make. The silhouette lends itself to avoidance of the subject, not being able to look at it directly.’

Kara Walker began exhibiting her work in 1995. She has had numerous solo exhibitions since then in galleries and museums in the US, Europe, and the Middle East, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Mannheimer Kunstverein in Munich, Deutsche Guggenheim, Tate Liverpool, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has also participated in group exhibitions such as SITE Santa Fe, the Whitney Biennial, and the Istanbul Biennale. Her works are in many important public collections.

Kendell Geers

South African-born, Belgian artist Kendell Geers changed his date of birth to May 1968 in order to give birth to himself as a work of art. Describing himself as an ‘AniMystikAKtivist’, Geers takes a syncretic approach to art that weaves together diverse Afro-European traditions, including animism, alchemy, mysticism, ritual and a socio-political activism laced with black humour, irony and cultural contradiction.

Geers’s work has been shown in numerous international group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (2007) and Documenta (2002). Major solo shows include Heart of Darkness at Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town (1993), Third World Disorder at Goodman Gallery Cape Town (2010) and more recently Songs of Innocence and of Experience at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg (2012). His exhibition Irrespektiv travelled to Newcastle, Ghent, Salamanca and Lyon between 2007 and 2009. Geers was included on Art Unlimited at Art 42 Basel in 2011. Work by Geers was included on Manifesta 9 in Genk, Limburg, Belgium and a major survey show of his work was exhibited at Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany in 2013. Earlier this year Geers held a solo exhibition, The Second Coming (Do What Thou Wilt), at Rua Red in Dublin.

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.

Bill Bidjocka

Bili Bidjocka was born in Douala, Cameroon, in 1962, but lived in Paris from the age of twelve. Nowadays, he moves between Paris, Brussels, and New York. Though he says of himself that he is a painter not a writer, Bidjocka acknowledges that he often begins a work with writing, with a title. ‘I am more inspired by writing than by painting’ he says. He has made works that are indicative of this impulse, the impulse to write, to reflect on writing, and, by extension, to create an archive of his own travels, memories, and experiences, but also of the memories and thoughts of others. This led to his creating an ongoing Le carnet de voyage and also a mammoth project called L’écriture infinie – envisioned as the ‘biggest archive of handwriting in the world’ in which people write as if what they are writing is the last thing they will write by hand in their lives. Bidjocka is inspired by African knowledge systems and draws on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. A spectacular beaded curtain invokes the Seder question, ‘Why is this night different from all other nights?’ and suggests associations with sacred practices. A photograph of Venice adorned with beaded script inspired by Arabic texts asserts an Islamic presence largely occluded in the centres of Europe. In all of these movements, across religious and secular texts and practices, Bidjocka asserts the primacy of making meaning out of experience.

Bidjocka has exhibited in the Johannesburg, Havana, Dakar, Taipei, and Venice biennales. He has also participated in landmark international exhibitions such as Zeitwenden at the Kunstmuseum in Bonn in 1999; Black President at the New Museum, New York in 2003; and Africa Remix (Düsseldorf, London, Paris, Tokyo, and Johannesburg, 2005–2007). In collaboration with Emily Cantrell and Jesus Polanco, he founded Matrix Art Project in 1995, a contemporary exhibition space in New York with branches in Paris and Brussels.

Deborah Bell

David Goldblatt

David Goldblatt (1930 – 2018) was born in Randfontein, a small mining town outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. Through his lens, South African he chronicled the structures, people and landscapes of South Africa from 1948 until his death in June 2018. Well known for his photography which explored both public and private life in South Africa, Goldblatt created a body of powerful images which depicted life during the time of Apartheid. Goldblatt also extensively photographed colonial era monuments and buildings with the idea that the architecture reveals something about the people who built them.

In particular, Goldblatt documented the people, landscapes and industry of the Witwatersrand, the resource-rich area in which he grew up and lived, where the local economy was based chiefly on mining. Equal parts artist and documentarian, Goldblatt was known for his practice of attaching extensive captions to his photographs, which almost always identify the subject, place, and time in which the image was taken. These titles often play a vital role in exposing the visible and invisible forces through which the country’s policies of extreme racism and segregation shaped the dynamics of life, especially along axes of gender, labor, identity, and freedom of movement. Beyond endowing his images with documentary power, Goldblatt’s titles also dignify the people and places he photographs.

In 1989, Goldblatt founded the Market Photography Workshop, a training institution in Johannesburg, for aspiring photographers. In 1998 he was the first South African to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Goldblatt Archive is held by Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut.

In 2001, a retrospective of his work, ‘David Goldblatt Fifty-One Years’ began a tour of galleries and museums. He was one of the few South African artists to exhibit at Documenta 11 (2002) and Documenta 12 (2007) in Kassel, Germany. A more recent retrospective includes, ‘David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive at the AIC’ (2018), which is now touring. This major traveling retrospective exhibition spans the seven decades of this South African photographer’s career, from the 1950s to the 2010s, demonstrating Goldblatt’s commitment to showing the realities of daily life in his country. The exhibition and accompanying publication bring together roughly 150 works by Goldblatt from the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago—two major Goldblatt repositories—including his early black-and-white photography and his post-apartheid, large-format color photography.

Goldblatt was the recipient of the 2006 Hasselblad award, the 2009 Henri Cartier-Bresson Award, the 2013 ICP Infinity Award and in 2016, he was awarded the Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the Ministry of Culture of France.

Other notable group exhibitions and biennales include: ILLUMInations at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, South Africa in Apartheid and After, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2013); Everything Was Moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s, Barbican Centre, London (2012). He also exhibited at the Jewish Museum (2010); and the New Museum (2009), both in New York.

Selected key collections include: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); Tate Modern, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The J. Paul Getty; Museum, Los Angeles; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography, Amsterdam; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; The Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm, Germany and New York; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Johannesburg Art Gallery, South Africa; Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles.

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.

Lisa Brice

Lisa Brice (b.1968, Cape Town, South Africa) negotiates the precarious terrain of artistic production, as she moves between practices of spontaneous drawing and figure painting. She makes use of unexpected painting and printing techniques on a variety of surfaces, which include canvas and tracing paper. For Brice, the act of tracing often leads her to a repetition of similar motifs or figures in her work, sometimes biographical, and at other times art historical: ‘I am attracted to the idea of repetition,’ Brice remarks. ‘Chasing that high, stories told and retold.’

In 2006 Brice had her first solo exhibition of paintings at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg, titled Night Vision, in which she reflected on the uncertainties of childhood. In 2009, a solo show, More Wood for the Fire, was presented at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg; the exhibition detailed Brice’s relationship with the island of Trinidad. In 2011, Brice’s work was included in the Vitamin P2 publication, Phaidon’s major anthology of international painting. In 2012, Brice presented a solo exhibition titled Throwing the Floor at Goodman Gallery in Cape Town. She has had subsequent shows at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg in 2015 titled Well Worn, and in June 2016 she was included on a show at Camden Art’s Centre in London Making & Unmaking curated by Duro Olowu. Brice had her first solo museum exhibition in the UK at the Tate Britain in 2018, where she exhibited large scale paintings which addressed the longstanding art-historical tradition of the female nude.

The artist lives and works in London, UK.

Hank Willis Thomas

Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976, New Jersey, United States) is a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture.

Thomas has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad including the International Center of Photography, New York; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain; Musée du quai Branly, Paris; Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong, and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Netherlands.

Thomas’ work is included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

His collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males, In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth), Writing on the Wall, and the artist-run initiative for art and civic engagement For Freedoms, which in 2017 was awarded the ICP Infinity Award for New Media and Online Platform. Thomas is also the recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2019), the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2018), Art for Justice Grant (2018), AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (2017), Soros Equality Fellowship (2017), and is a member of the New York City Public Design Commission. Thomas holds a B.F.A. from New York University (1998) and an M.A./M.F.A. from the California College of the Arts (2004). In 2017, he received honorary doctorates from the Maryland Institute of Art and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts.

Sam Nhlengethwa

Sam Nhlengethwa (b. 1955, Payneville, Springs) part of a pioneering generation of late 20th century South African artists whose work reflects the sociopolitical history and everyday life of their country. Through his paintings, collages and prints Nhlengethwa has depicted the evolution of Johannesburg through street life, interiors, jazz musicians and fashion.

Nhlengethwa was born in the Black township community of Payneville near Springs (a satellite mining town east of Johannesburg), in 1955 and grew up in Ratanda location in nearby Heidelberg. In the 1980s, he moved to Johannesburg where he honed his practice at the renowned Johannesburg Art Foundation under its founder Bill Ainslie. Nhlengethwa is one of the founders of the legendary Bag Factory, in Newtown, in the heart of the Johannesburg CBD, where he used to share studio space with fellow greats of this pioneering generation of South African artists, such as David Koloane and Pat Mautloa.

In 2014, a major survey exhibition, titled Life, Jazz and Lots of Other Things, was hosted by SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, which was then co-hosted in Atlanta by SCAD and the Carter Center.

Nhlengethwa’s practice features in important arts publications, such as Phaidon’s The 20th Century Art Book (2001).

Other notable exhibitions and accolades in South Africa and around the world include: in 1994 – the year South Africa held its first democratic elections – Nhlengethwa was awarded the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year award; in 1995, his work was included in the Whitechapel Gallery’s Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa in London; in 2000, he participated in a two-man show at Seippel Art Gallery in Cologne.

Group exhibitions include: Constructions: Contemporary Art from South Africa, Museu de Arte Contemporanea de Niteroi, Brazil (2011); Beyond Borders: Global Africa, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Michigan (2018).

Biennales include: 6th Beijing Biennale in (2015); 55th Venice Biennale, as part of the South African Pavilion, titled Imaginary Fact: Contemporary South African Art and the Archive (2013); 12th International Cairo Biennale (2010); 8th Havana Biennale (2003); Southern African Stories: A Print Collection, CCA (Caribbean Contemporary Arts), Trinidad (2002).

Collections include: Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG), Durban Art Gallery (DAG), Iziko South African National Art Gallery (ISANG), Standard Bank’s Head Office, Absa, Botswana Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, amongst many in South Africa and abroad.

Nhlengethwa lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Kudzanai Chiurai

Kudzanai Chiurai (b. 1981, Harare, Zimbabwe) is a multidisciplinary artist exploring notions and cycles of political, economic, and social strife present in post-colonial societies. His work interrogates urgent social issues, such as xenophobia, exile, displacement, the psychological experiences of urban spaces, as well as the Western imprint on Africa.

In 2024, Chiurai’s film We Live in Silence (Chapters 1 – 7) was on view as part of the main exhibition at the 60th Venice Biennale Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa. In 2023, photographs from the artist’s We Live in Silence series were part of A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography, at TATE Modern curated by Osei Bonsu.

In 2013, Chiurai’s Conflict Resolution series was exhibited at DOCUMENTA (13) (2012) in Kassel and the film Iyeza was one of the few African films to be included in the New Frontier shorts programme at the Sundance Film Festival.

Chiurai’s project, The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember, is built around his collecting practice which focuses on preserving archives and memorialising social and cultural history from southern Africa. The project exists in the form of an archive of materials situated in Johannesburg including vinyls, posters, paintings and more, drawn from private African collections. Each time this archive is exhibited, Chiurai invites a different librarian to interrogate the archive and curate an exhibition.

Solo exhibitions include: Genesis [Je n’isi isi], We Live in Silence, IFA, Stuttgart (2019); Madness and Civilization, Kalmar Konsmuseum, Sweden (2018); Now and Then: Guercino and Kudzanai Chiurai, Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town (2018); and Regarding the Ease of Others, Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town (2017).

Group shows include: FLIGHT, Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (2023); Ubuntu, a Lucid Dream, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2020); Art/Afrique, Le nouvel atelier, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2017); The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2014) and travelled to the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2015); Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2011); and Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011).

Collections include: Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami; Pigozzi Collection, Geneva; Walther Collection, New York; and Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town.

Chiurai lives and works in Harare, Zimbabwe.

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.

Mikhael Subotzky

Mikhael Subotzky’s (b. 1981, Cape Town) works are the results of his fractured attempts to place himself in relation to the social, historical, and political narratives that surround him. As an artist working in film, video installation and photography, as well as more recently in collage and painting, Subotzky engages critically with contemporary politics of images and their making. “At the heart of my work is a fixation with revealing the gap between what is presented (and idealised) and what is hidden, coupled with a desire to pull apart and reassemble the schizophrenia of contemporary existence,” he says.

Subotzky’s first body of photographic work, Die Vier Hoeke (The Four Corners), was an in-depth study of the South African penal system. Umjiegwana (The Outside) and Beaufort West extended this investigation to the relationship between everyday life in post-apartheid South Africa and the historical, spatial, and institutional structures of control. Retinal Shift was produced by Subotzky on the occasion of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award 2012 and toured South Africa’s major museums and critically engaged with his ambivalence towards the processes of representation and image construction. Ponte City, a collaboration with artist Patrick Waterhouse, focuses on a single 54-story building that dominates the Johannesburg skyline. The building is cast as the central character in a myriad of interweaving narratives that, through photographs, commissioned texts, historical documents, and urban myths, chart the convoluted histories of both the building and Johannesburg itself. The Ponte City exhibition, which consists of a single installation of thousands of photographs and documents, has been acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the accompanying publication won the 2015 Deutsche Borse Photography Prize.

Subotzky’s work has been exhibited in recent museum presentations The Struggle of Memory at Palais Populaire, Berlin (2024) and Fragile Beauty: Photographs from the Sir Elton John and David Furnish Collection at Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2024).

Notable solo and two-person exhibitions include Home Building Ideas for South Africa (or A Cape Town Landscape), Goodman Gallery Cape Town (2024); Epilogue, Goodman Gallery, London (2022); Tell It To The Mountains, (with Lindokuhle Sobekwa) A4 Foundation, Cape Town (2021); Mikhael Subotzky: WYE, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney (2016); Ponte City (with Patrick Waterhouse), National Galleries, Scotland, UK, then travelled to Le Bal, Paris and FOMU, Antwerp (2014).

His work was included in the 12th Cairo Biennale (2010), The Unexpected Guest, Liverpool Biennial (2012), Rencontres Picha Biennale de Lubumbashi, Lubumbashi (2013) and the 56th Venice Biennale: All the World’s Futures, Venice (2015).

Public collections include Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington; Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the South African National Gallery, among others.

Subotzky lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Ghada Amer

Ghada Amer was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1963 and moved to Nice, France when she was eleven years old. She remained in France to further her education and completed both of her undergraduate requirements and MFA at Villa Arson École Nationale Supérieure in Nice (1989), during which she also studied abroad at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts in 1987. In 1991 she moved to Paris to complete a post-diploma at the Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques. Following early recognition in France, she was invited to the United States in 1996 for a residency at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has since then been based in New York.

Amer’s wide-ranging practice spans painting, cast sculpture, ceramics, works on paper, and garden and mixed-media installations. Further, she often collaborates with her long-time friend Reza Farkhondeh. Recognising both that women are taught to model behaviors and traits shaped by others, and that art history and the history of painting in particular are shaped largely by expressions of masculinity, Amer’s work actively subverts these frameworks through both aesthetics and content. Her practice explores the complicated nature of identity as it is developed through cultural and religious norms as well as personal longings and understandings of the self.

Amer’s work is in public collections around the world including The Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, NY; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; the Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabi; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Samsung Museum, Seoul; among others. Among invitations to prestigious group shows and biennials—such as the Whitney Biennial in 2000 and the Venice Biennales of 1999 (where she won the UNESCO Prize), 2005 and 2007—she was given a midcareer retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York in 2008. Multiple institutions across Marseille, France are currently co-organising a retrospective for 2022 that will travel to the United States and Asia.