ドイツを拠点に活動する南アフリカ人アーティスト、ドナ・クカマ（Donna Kukama）の作品集。

donna Kukama’s diverse artistic practice is informed by history: “it’s history with a small ‘h’", says the artist in her interview with Khwezi Gule, “and it’s looking at ways of remembering ourselves”. This publication, designed by ATLAS Studio, includes a selection of her multi-disciplined work dating from 2006 to 2024. It is presented in a non-chronological survey that challenges the conventional book format in and of itself – opening at page 93, continuing to the colophon and title page before recommencing at page 1 in the middle of the binding – in the same way as Kukama routinely unravels accepted narratives around the institutions of art, education and documentation.

donna Kukama has been creating performance works for several decades, works that she enacts in and outside of art events or contexts. The documentation of these performances has evolved from that of incidental “witnessing”, to being a central component in the making of the works, where the camera is imagined as its chosen audience. The former moments are reproduced for the publication in a lower grain, suggestive of the media of news-gathering and transmission. By contrast, Kukama’s tangible works are presented in high resolution. These works, which combine traditional art media like acrylic, oil stick and charcoal with intangible, “non-visible" ingredients including revenge, instinct, tears or screams, emerged latterly in the artist’s practice – the earliest here are from 2015 – from her investigation of alternative methods of documentation and remembering, and have since become one of several distinct yet interconnected facets of her work. An extensive conversation between Kukama and Johannesburg-based writer and curator Khwezi Gule included in the book offers insights into yet further strands of her practice.  

Kukama’s work, as is evident in this publication, is embedded in and indivisible from the realities of contemporary society. Nonetheless she employs the platform of art as a means to propose other ways of being: "I do this knowing that within this framework, I’m able to manufacture and live my own reality, or at least create, beyond my day-to-day experience.”

Interview with Khwezi Gule