Donna Kukama

by Nathaniel Stern

Don’t miss our launch party on 9 February @ the Berlin Bar, Johannesburg!

Donna Kukama has been on a trajectory of exploring and performing the boundaries between inside / outside, flesh / self, and the relations and investments we have in objects and social status. She is currently studying for her Master of Arts in Sierre, Switzerland; we had a discussion about her work mid-last year.

At that time, Kukama was struggling against being defined by her peers - she was “an emerging, black, female, South African artist,” full stop. Feisty and considerate, she was attempting to rebel against what she called a mis/use of identity politics in order to circumvent the politics of the art world. Ironically, in her quest to break out of a boxed in and imputed singularity, Kukama was putting herself smack in the middle of this very dialogue - sometimes with very successful and beautiful interrogations of body and character, and sometimes with works that are very different from what she intended. Rather than trying to “unfold the spaces of her gendered and raced body, to find the stigmas of social inscription,”1 Kukama explored and shared an intimacy of personal experience, simultaneously daring her onlookers to find the lack and the excess, of confinement and of humanness.

Blind Lullaby and Blind Sleep, video diptych @ Franchise gallery in Joburg, 2005

Blind Lullaby and Blind Sleep, for example, were framed as a-sexual landscapes of Kukama’s well-lit dark skin, which could just as easily have been shadows on whiteness. At first formalistic, I got a growing sense of discomfort around questioning whether her intensions were political, personal, aesthetic, or all three. In discussions, Donna had a bit of a dark wit, and a short temper for reductionism - she preferred people to look, listen and reflect. She liked to talk about her work, but mostly the questions that inspired her, the responses from her audience.

Curio, performance, 2004, Gerhard Sekoto Gallery, Johannesburg

Curio set out to “send up” the organizers of Young Vision 2004: 11 Promising Artists:

I tightly wrapped myself from head to toe in a white fabric, which only revealed my hair… Whilst blinded and suffocating, the body continued to move, often attempting to break free from its own cocoon… slowly retreat to the ground, breathe again… using minimal and repetitive gestures…. [It was] a reaction to the space… [to] a “classified” emergence.

I think Donna’s own artist statement about this work was very telling. Once “she” wrapped herself in her anti-identity, “the body” became its own actor - an ironic Cartesian split provoked by socially constructed specifications.

Behind Kukama at this performance, were clippings of hair and nails on canvas, spray-painted white. Unfortunately, I don’t think the black/white and body/identity binaries framed in this piece could be considered a successful deconstruction of themselves - they were a bit too easy, too readily compartmentalized (and not ironically) to argue against categorization. But the piece is far from devoid of merit. Tripping over her, watching her crawling desperate pleas to break - with the occasional “oops” of trying to remain hidden - created several accidental moments of clarity in the hypocrisies all of our political agendas take. Perhaps, in a future work, Kukama could accent and enhance such errors in more of an inter-course between the exceptions and acceptions we must make.

breath, video, 2004

Kukama’s “involuntary performance” series documented seemingly mundane actions like blinking, breathing and swallowing, but the video mosaics she created were haunted by a desire to halt her own involuntary performance as a known entity. Her tainted collections of dead hair and nails were commonly used for mixed media wall-hangings that are reminiscent of, and poke fun at, South African land- and skyscapes.

all nails go to heaven, mixed media, 2004

Kukama’s role as an artist, which was mostly as a youthful interrogator until very recently, has taken a sharp turn since her temporary move to Europe. Where her performances before were mostly a response to the post-Apartheid / “Rainbow Nation” environment around her, she now finds inspiration in anthropological texts and ritual performance.

In a recent email exchange with me, for example, Donna wondered if the hair and nails she uses could not be seen “as borderline parts of the body,” if they’re state and color said something “as a sign of status.” With almost new wonder, she says her performances are a chance to engage, in a trance-like state, between memory, loss and the everyday, but without the necessity of politic or the spectacular.

Of Laughing & Crying, her latest work, Kukama says it is “improvised and based on playing and discovering… to find meaning in the moment of the accident.” In the same mail, her excited, written statement for the piece ironically lacked any physical description, and consisted only of adjectives - perhaps a texted version of itself. It sounded like disparate moments of “concentrated… consciousness,” harsh emotions sandwiched between nothing; she admits this to be a narcissistic phase in her development.

Armed with her performance experience and newly-found stimuli, Donna Kukama will continue asking us to examine ourselves, and our humanness, with the utmost scrutiny.

¹ paraphrased from Rebecca Schneider’s The Explicit Body in Performance

Next feature is 16 February: Bronwyn Lace, a Johannesburg-based, installation artist, just before her YAP/first solo show at the KZNSA in Durban.