Chapter V: Even when we are all no longer visible, I will continue to breathe for us

Donna Kukama's current and ongoing site-specific series presents an ephemeral (hi)story book that is not limited to a physical form with bound paper and written text. The body of work has taken the form of performances, text, objects, memories, drawing, installation, and sound specifically related to monuments, memorials and commemorations for those who absolutely need to be remembered.

The book was originally conceived as a tool for questioning and rethinking memorials, monuments, and national commemorations within the South African landscape. Chapters have since been presented in a range of other contexts. Each chapter physically revisits sites of violence - whether physical or discursive, personal or public - directed at and experienced by socially, structurally, and economically marginalized bodies, and communes with the memories of bodies that have been placed on the margins of historical metanarratives.

Each chapter is conceived as a performance/intervention, and each chapter's title is non-chronologically named after a letter from the modern English alphabet.

As part of the project by Kiluanji Kia Henda The Sound is the Monument, Kukama will present a new chapter in Bergen with Volt at Østre.

Donna Kukama is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is informed by performance-based research processes. Through performance, video, sound and texts, her work questions the way in which histories are narrated as well as how value systems are constructed.

Kukama has exhibited and presented performances at, among others, Tate Modern, London; Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham; Padiglione de'Arte Contemporanea Milano, Milan; South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Museum of Modern Art, Antwerp; nGbK, Berlin; and the New Museum, New York.

She has participated in, among others, the 10th Berlin Biennale; the 57th Belgrade Biennale; 12th Lyon Biennale; the 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art; 32nd Bienal de São Paulo and 8th Berlin Biennale and the 55th Venice Biennale as part of the South African Pavilion.

For the past ten years she has held the post of lecturer in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. From 2019 to 2020 she was a guest professor at the Braunschweig University of Art in Germany, and she is currently a guest artist for the Work.Master programme at the Academy of Art and Design, HEAD Genève, in Geneva.