donna Kukama is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice engages performance art as a tool for creative research. Her work presents institutions, monuments, gestures of protest, rumours, and fleeting moments. Using performance, video, text, sound, and multimedia installations, her practice takes on an experimental form, applying methods that are deliberately undisciplined.
Kukama questions historic narratives and the evolution of values systems. She weaves major with minor aspects of histories, introducing fragile and brief moments of 'strangeness' within sociopolitical settings. Her performances are gestures of poetry with political intent, challenging the ways we look at reality. In these, she inserts foreign 'undocumented' voices and presences into history by occupying sites and territories that remember less-told stories.
Kukama lives and works in Cologne, Germany, where she is a professor of Contemporary Art with a focus on the Global South at the Academy of Media Arts (KHM).
She has exhibited and presented performances at various international institutions and museums including the South London Gallery; Tate Modern; Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery Toronto; Nottingham Contemporary; De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill On Sea; Arnolfini in Bristol; Padiglione de'Arte Contemporanea; South African National Gallery in; Museum of Modern Art, Antwerp; and the New Museum in New York.