(Donna
Kukama. Pic: Timmy Henny)
The National Arts Festival has named an
unprecedented eight young South Africans winners of the prestigious Standard
Bank Young Artist Award, bringing to 125 the total number honoured since
Standard Bank began sponsoring the Awards three decades ago.
The Award is made annually to young South
African artists who are either on the threshold of national acclaim, or whose
artistic excellence has enabled them to make international breakthroughs.
“Celebrating excellence, innovation and a refined technical skill and artistry
rests at the heart of the Standard Bank Young Artist Awards. Each of this
year’s winners represent the vibrancy and sophistication with which South
Africa’s artistic and cultural legacy continues to be enriched” said Festival
Artistic Director, Ismail Mahomed.
The
National Arts Festival’s 2014 Standard Bank Young Artist for Performance Art is
Johannesburg-based public artist and lecturer, Donna Kukama.
Born in
1981 in Mafikeng; Kukama completed her postgraduate studies at the Ecole
Cantonale d’Art du Valais in Sierre (Switzerland) in 2008, under MAPS (Master
of Arts in the Public Sphere), and is currently a faculty member at the WITS
School of Arts (University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg).
Despite
her formal education, for which she acknowledges she is most grateful, Kukama’s
approach to her practice is experimental and she mostly applies methods she
describes as ‘deliberately undisciplined’ as she navigates between spaces of
performance, video, text, and sound installations.
Kukama
has participated and performed in various exhibitions and art fairs, including
the Joburg Art Fair in 2009 and 2012, Art Miami 2009, ARCO Madrid 2010,
SUPERMARKET ART FAIR in 2012, and has been selected to perform during the Lyon
Biennale as well as the South African Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013.
She has performed and participated in exhibitions at various public spaces and
museums internationally, including the New Museum in New York, the South
African National Gallery, The Kunsthalle Luzern and the Kunsthaus Graz.
Award
nominations for her work include the MTN New Contemporaries Award (2010), the
Ernst Schering Award (2011), and the Visible Award (NON NON Collective, 2011).
Kukama is one of the founding members of the Centre for Historical
Re-enactments, a Johannesburg-based independent platform that died by means of
institutional suicide on the 12th day of the 12th month in 2012 following a
two-year existence between 2010 and 2012.
As an
artist whose interest is in occupying an existing canon, Kukama uses
performance as a strategy that allows her to invent - as well as apply -
methods that are outside of what is predictable or expected. Explaining that
winning the Standard Bank Young Artist Award means a great deal on paper, and
acknowledging that ‘things on paper’ mean a great deal to a lot of people,
including herself, she admits: “It just allows for the way my work is viewed
and perceived to shift slightly, especially in those spaces where it is not
perceivable as ‘work’.”
“Being
an artist was not a decision I made”, elaborates the diminutive 32 year old, “I
was always a creative person as far back as I can remember. As a kid in Grade
One, I made and sold paper-dolls and paper-clothes, for extra lunch-money. In
early high school, I toyi-toyied and delivered a “memorandum of complaints” to
my mother regarding a domestic issue (I think a friend and I were asking for
more pre-bedtime hours). I carried a brown briefcase every day from Standard 9
until I completed Matric. Come to think of it, I’ve always had odd habits,
which have come to filter into my work.”
Kukama
applies performance as a medium of resistance against already established “ways
of doing”, and also as a strategy for inserting an alien voice and presence into
various moments in history, as much as in existing public territories. Weaving
major with minor aspects of histories, she introduces fragile and brief moments
of ‘strangeness’ within socio-political settings - gestures of poetry with
political intent, intended to destabilize existing perspectives of reality.
Kukama
remembers her first independent trip to the National Arts Festival, in 2003 -
the year Berni Searle won the Award for Visual Arts, and the first time she had
come across the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Arts (she had
previously only been aware of Drama and Dance). She says she dreamt of getting
the Award herself, but “needless to say, soon realised that the work I was
making did not fit comfortably into the Visual Arts category.”
She goes
on to describe that “During that Festival I wore my clothes until they were so
dirty that, when I returned home I washed them all in a bathtub, and produced a
series of photographs of the residue, entitled “mud slut”. Through the creation
of deliberately “aesthetic objects” out of the dirt and stains left in the bathtub,
the photographs acted as a conceptual document of that journey. I only have one
image left over from that series at my home - the rest were sold to a
collector.
“I think
there is generally not enough attention paid to performance art locally,” she adds,
“and winning the Young Artist Award is a heck of a confidence boost for me, and
hopefully others working in the same field. It’s taken me ten years of
performing to public audiences both inside and outside of the art world to
arrive at this level of recognition, and I hope that ten years from now, this
art form will be as populated as the other traditional forms of art, if not
more”
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