VUSUMZI NKOMO

(b.1993 South Africa)

Vusumzi Nkomo studied fine art at the Cape Town Creative Academy, where he earned his Bachelor’s degree in 2023 and Honours in 2024. An article in Art Forum recently described Nkomo as “an integral part of Cape Town’s small but vital downtown art scene, and possibly one of its key thinkers, too.” With reference to his inclusion in a major museum exhibition by Nolan Oswald Dennis at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Sean O'Toole asserts  that “Nkomo’s practice slots into a lineage of austere, non-referential sculpture freighted with social implications. His method of using everyday things — shoe polish and salt — to create propositional statements links him to contemporary artists like [Moshekwa] Langa, Igshaan Adams, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Nicholas Hlobo and Kemang wa Lehulere.”

His latest solo exhibition Discordant Infrastructure and other minor gestures uses descriptions of weather during the winter of 1913 by Sol T. Plaatje (1876-1932) in his Native Life in South Africa (1916) as a point of departure. Through strategies of exchange and participation, Nkomo extends his interests in the violence of financial abstractions, maritime trade and insurance, value, risk and speculation.

Working with a range of materials such as concrete, glass and mirrors, shoe- and floor-polish, sea salt, soil and ash, Nkomo stages speculative encounters between objects to expose the operations of structural violence and paradigmatic precarity in the longue durée of South Africa’s history of racial slavery, colonialism and their afterlives. Often drawing from conceptualist and minimalist strategies, Nkomo is interested in seriality, repetition, fragmentation, movement and multiplicity, as modes of demystifying the pervasiveness of anti-blackness as structuring modality of Black life.

In 2024, Nkomo presented his debut solo exhibition Ityala aliboli at the Association for Visual Arts (Cape Town). Propositions for dis-order subsequently took place at THK Gallery (Cape Town).

Selected group presentations include: Investec Cape Town Art Fair, with Everard Read; Grammars at Lemkus Gallery; SENSES at Michaelis Galleries, curated by Kamogelo Walaza; over/under at Lemkus Gallery (2024); Fullhouse at blank projects, curated by FEDE and Under Projects; TEXT organised by Kamyar Bineshtarigh and Brett Charles Seiler (2023); Occupation at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, curated by Thuli Gamedze, Zen Marie, and Gilles Furtwängler; PILOT (2022).

His sound art includes a durational performance with his collective DEAD SYMBOLS and artists / composers Rowan Smith and Fernando Damon, at Under Projects and a sonic lecture titled Sagrili and the Coming of Western Schools in dialogue with Portuguese artist Grada Kilomba’s A World of Illusions at Norval Foundation. He has also produced work as part of sound collective Blackness and Dance with American writer Kim Reynolds and sound artist / composer Dani Kyengo O’Neill / BUJIN.

EDUCATION

2024       BA Honours Degree, Cape Town Creative Academy

2023       BA Contemporary Arts, Cape Town Creative Academy

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2024     

Discordant Infrastructure and other minor gestures, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

Propositions for dis-order, THK Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

Ityala aliboli, Association for Visual Arts (AVA), Cape Town, South Africa

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2025      

Investec Cape Town Art Fair, with Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

2024      

Little Life, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

Grammers, curated by Jared Leite, Lemkus Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

Winter, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

SENSES, curated by Kamogelo, Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town, South Africa

under/over, curated by Jared Leite and Jade Nair,  Lemkus Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

2023      

Fullhouse, curated by Under Projects and FEDE,  Blank Projects, Cape Town, South Africa

TEXT, organised by artists Kamyar Bineshtarigh and Brett Seiler, Cape Town, South Africa

2022      

Sagrili and The Coming of Western Schools, a sonic lecture in dialogue with Grada Kilomba’s

“A World of Illusions” at Norval Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa

OCCUPATION, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa

PILOT, Under Projects, Cape Town, South Africa

COLLECTIONS

Kilbourn collection, Cape Town, South Africa

Vilsmeier Linhares / Brain Lab collection, Munich, Germany

RESIDENCIES

2024       POOL SPACE, Cape Town, South Africa

WRITING

A strange diaspora: Thania Petersen’s Rampies Sny [ESPACE art actuel]

On the Structure(s) of Abstraction: Mongezi Ncaphayi’s ‘Standard of Language’ [ArtThrob]

How Berni Searle Contemplates the Weight of Loss [Contemporary And]

Bonding Over Blacks: Mario Moore’s A Student’s Dream [The Thinker]

Debt [iLiso Magazine]

EXHIBITION TEXTS

A Dance with Death: Blessing Ngobeni, catalogue essay for Everard Read and the Standard Bank Art Prize

A World of Illusions: Grada Kilomba, catalogue essay for Norval Foundation

The Long View, catalogue essay for a Group Exhibition featuring works by painters Rentia Retief and Larita Engelbrecht at EBONY/ CURATED