donna Kukama is a South African interdisciplinary artist whose practice merges various media by using performance as a tool for artistic research. Moving across performance, video, painting, and installation, her practice often presents socially engaged art through unconventional modes of storytelling in order to destabilize existing historical metanarratives and how we look at reality. Her work takes on an experimental and undisciplined form. With her practice, Kukama opens up multiple ways of inhabiting space, creating other worlds, and conceiving reality. To counter the predictable, she goes beyond the constraints of identity to uncover its complexities, layers, and contradictions while actively opening up possibilities for different narratives and less-told histories to exist. Whether written, drawn, performed, or sculptural, her work can be understood as gestures of poetry that speak about time and memory while presenting alternate realities where both the material and immaterial coexist to engage erasures within history.
Kukama is represented by blank Projects (Cape Town) and Galerie Tschudi (Zurich & Zuoz) and lives and works in Cologne (Germany), where she is a Professor in Contemporary Art Focusing on the Global South at the Academy for Media Arts (KHM).