donna Kukama

donna Kukama is an interdisciplinary artist who uses performance art as a tool for creative research.

Biography of donna Kukama

donna Kukama was born in 1981 in Mahikeng, South Africa. She received a National Diploma in Fine Arts from the Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria. She also earned a Master’s in Art in the Public Sphere (MAPS) from the École Cantonale d'Arts du Valais in Switzerland and is in the process of completing her PhD in Art & Media at the University of Plymouth, UK.

In addition to her artistic practice, Kukama is an educator who has taught at universities and art schools across South Africa and Europe. She currently resides in Cologne, Germany, where she serves as a professor of contemporary art with a focus on the Global South at the Academy of Media Arts (KHM).

donna Kukama has received several awards and scholarships, including the Wyss Scholarship (2005-2008), the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Performance Art (2014), and the DAAD Scholarship (2019).  

Her solo exhibitions include "t r a n s c e n d e n c e" at Galerie Tschudi in Zuoz (2023), "Ways-of-Remembering-Existing" at Wits Art Museum in Johannesburg (2022), "For Time-Travellers in Search of Fresh Air" at Turba Gallery in Hannover (2020), "mooood" at blank projects in Cape Town (2019), and many more.

Additionally, Kukama's works have been featured in numerous group shows held at various galleries and museums worldwide, including SixtySix London in London, Johannesburg Art Gallery in Johannesburg, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, Glasshouse ArtLifeLab in New York, Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town, Centre for Contemporary Art FUTURA in Prague, among others.

Currently, the artist lives and works in Cologne, Germany.

donna Kukama's Art Style

Spanning performance, video, painting, and installation, Kukama's practice offers thought-provoking and socially engaged art through unconventional storytelling methods. This approach challenges existing historical metanarratives and shifts our perspectives on reality.

Through her ongoing work, Kukama explores new ways of experiencing space, creating, and understanding the world. By moving beyond predictable constraints of identity, she uncovers its complexities, layers, and contradictions. Her approach actively creates space for diverse narratives and lesser-known histories, resulting in art that is experimental, inventive, and provocatively unorthodox.

Whether through writing, drawing, performance, or sculpture, her work can be seen as poetic gestures that address themes of time and memory. It presents alternative realities where both material and immaterial elements coexist, engaging with erasures in contemporary South African history and beyond.

The artist employs performance as a strategy to invent and apply methods beyond the predictable or conventional. She challenges traditional narrative histories and subverts established value systems by focusing on methods and perspectives from the Global South. For Kukama, performance serves as a means to introduce overlooked or ‘undocumented’ voices into historical discourse, by occupying spaces and territories that hold less-told stories.