Art Joburg 2024

Ravelle Pillay (b. 1993, Durban, South Africa) is a painter who considers the legacies of colonialism and migration, and their subsequent hauntings and reverberations in the present. She draws from found and family photographs and the material degradation of images over time to consider agency, memory, and life-making. 

Pillay’s first institutional show, Idyll, opened at Chisenhale Gallery, London in 2023. This followed a residency at Gasworks London at the end of 2022. 

Pillay is the first prize recipient of the 2022 African Art Galleries Association’s Emerging Painting Invitational. 

Group exhibitions include: (Un)Natural: Constructed Environments, Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina (2023-2024); Soulscapes, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London (2024); Silence Calling from One Continent to Another, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2021).

Pillay lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Sam Nhlengethwa (b. 1955, Payneville, Springs) part of a pioneering generation of late 20th century South African artists whose work reflects the sociopolitical history and everyday life of their country. Through his paintings, collages and prints Nhlengethwa has depicted the evolution of Johannesburg through street life, interiors, jazz musicians and fashion. 

Selected solo exhibitions include: Jazz and Blues at night, Goodman Gallery, London (2021); Leeto: Print retrospective, Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg (2019); IN FOCUS: SAM NHLENGETHWA, The University of Michigan Museum, Michigan (2017); Life, Jazz and Lots of Other Things, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia (2014); Townships Re-visited, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2006); and Homage to Jazz, Standard Bank Young Artist Award travelling show, South Africa (1994-5).

Group exhibitions include: Through an African Lens: Sub-Saharan Photography from the Museum’s Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2020). Travelled to Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia until 11 March 2024; TRANS, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg (2018); BEYOND BORDERS: GLOBAL AFRICA, The University of Michigan Museum, Michigan (2018); South Africa: The Art of a Nation, British Museum, London (2017) among others. 

Major international solo exhibitions include: Between Memory and Forgetting, The Box, Plymouth, UK (2023);  Other Voices, Other Cities, Las Palmas (2023); Can’t Remember, Can’t Forget, Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg (2017); Other Voices, Other Cities, SCAD Museum of Art, Georgia (2015), Messages from the Moat, Den Haag, (2003) and The Last Supper Revisited, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C. (2002). 

Awards and fellowships include: The Living Legends Award (2020), attributed by the South African government’s Department of Sports, Arts and Culture; the University of Johannesburg’s Ellen Kuzwayo Award (2018); the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Creative Arts Fellowship (2011); the Smithsonian’s Visual Artist Research Award Fellowship (2007) and the Lucas Artists Residency Fellowship (2005) from Montalvo Art Center in California.

Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, Misheck Masamvu’s (b. 1980, Mutare, Zimbabwe) works allow him to address the past while searching for a way of being in the world. As one of the most significant artists from Zimbabwe, Masamvu’s work offers a renewed understanding of visual culture in Africa and the decolonial project more broadly. Rhythmic lines and layered fields of colour have become a prominent language for Masamvu to explore structures of power and how history comes to bear on the contemporary moment, but also how one can adapt to a new way of interacting with the world.

Laura Lima’s (b. 1971, Governador Valadares, Minas Gerais, Brazil) practice employs a variety of media often incorporating living organisms and actions that are performed for long periods of time, to explore ways in which human behaviour alters our perception of the everyday.

Lima was the recipient of the Bonnefanten Award for Contemporary Art (BACA), in 2014, and the Marcantonio Vilaça Award in 2006. The artist was also nominated for the Francophone Award in 2011 and the Han Nefkens Award in 2012. Laura Lima: Balè Literal, a major solo exhibition held at MACBA in 2023 which will tour to MAM Rio de Janeiro in May 2025. A dedicated publication is due to be published later in the year by Cobogó.

Clive van den Berg (b. 1956, Luanshya, Zambia) is a Johannesburg-based artist, curator and designer who has focused on pioneering the insertion of queer perspectives into the larger rewrite of South African history throughout the course of his prolific forty-year career. Van den Berg has produced a range of works spanning a variety of mediums delve into the porous nature of human existence and the landscapes we inhabit, creating a profound commentary on vulnerability, memory, and the intersection of personal and collective histories.

Van den Berg’s retrospective, Porous, is on view at the Wits Art Museum until October 2024, accompanied by a major new book published by Skira.

His public projects have included the artworks for landmark Northern Cape Legislature and, since he has joined the trace team, museum projects for the Nelson Mandela Foundation, Constitution Hill, Freedom Park, the Workers Museum, The Holocaust and Genocide Centre and many other projects.

Solo exhibitions include: Porous, Wits Art Museum (2024); Remembering, a survey exhibition of paintings, prints and sculptures, Kwa-Zulu Natal Society of Art Gallery, Durban (2021); Personal Affects, Museum of African Art, New York (2005). 

Major curated exhibitions include: If You Look Hard Enough, You Can See Our Future: Selections of Contemporary South African Art from the Nando’s Art Collection, The African American Museum of Dallas, Dallas (2023); Breaking Down the Walls: 150 years of Art Collecting, Iziko SANG, Cape Town (2023); Screening of Memorials Without Facts: Men Loving, São Paulo Museum of Art, São Paulo (2018); Earth Matters: Lands as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington D.C. (2013-2014).

Collections include: El Espacio 23, Miami; Amant Foundation, New York; A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town; Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg; Spier Arts Trust, London; Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Smithsonian Museum of African Art, Washington DC and Video Brasil, Sao Paulo.

Van den Berg lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Shakinovsky collaborates with Gavronsky as the artist “rosenclaire”, as wives and as dedicated mentors who have run a renowned artists residency program in Tuscany for the past 30 years. 

Claire Gavronsky (b. 1957, Johannesburg) works in a variety of mediums, most notably in painting and sculpture. Her work often uses visual references to historical paintings, and cues are sometimes taken from events from everyday life. Memory, racism, violence against women and children are some of the themes which run through her oeuvre.

Notable solo and group exhibitions include: Io e Me. Autoritratti nel Lockdown. Sala 1, Centro Internazionale d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2021); Speechless with Rose Shakinovsky, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2018); Right to the Future, Museum of 20th and 21st Century Art, St Petersburg (2017); Colour Theory with Rose Shakinovsky, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2014); Dakar Biennale, Dakar (2010); and Dystopia, collaboration with William Kentridge, Pretoria, Johannesburg, Ghent (2009-2010).

Rose Shakinovsky’s (b. 1953, Johannesburg) work defies any stylistic category as it consists of work that ranges from the re-presentation and decontextualization of found objects, found images and found situations, to delicately painted abstractions and ironic bronzes. The work concerns itself with current political and social discourses while simultaneously referencing and reconstructing art historical edifices. Her present research is concerned with discourses pertaining to the posthuman, transhuman and the consequences of climate change.

Nolan Oswald Dennis (b. 1988, Lusaka, Zambia) is a para-disciplinary artist from Johannesburg, South Africa. Their practice explores what they call ‘a black consciousness of space’: the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization. Dennis’ work questions the politics of space (and time) through a system-specific, rather than site-specific approach. They are concerned with the hidden structures that pre-determine the limits of our social and political imagination. Through a language of diagrams, drawings and models they explore a hidden landscape of systematic and structural conditions that organise our political sub-terrain.

In 2024, Dennis designed the Traces of Ecstasy pavilion and exhibition project for the Lagos Biennial in Tafawa Balewa Square. An adapted version of this project was on view at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in the same year. Dennis was also shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize 2023/24. 

Dennis was the 2020 artist in residence at NTUCCA (Singapore) and the 2021 artist in residence at the Delfina Foundation (London). They were awarded the FNB Arts Prize in 2016. They are a founding member of artist groups NTU and the Index Literacy Program, as well as a research associate at the VIAD research centre at the University of Johannesburg.

Solo shows include: Nolan Oswald Dennis, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2023); Positions #7, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands (2023); models (from a black planetarium), Centre d’Art Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland (2022); Specifications for a Reverse Archaeology, The Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria (2022-2023); conditions, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2021); Options, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, (2019).

Group shows and biennales include: back wall project, Kunsthalle Basel (2024); 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2023); the 12th Liverpool Biennial (2023), Frieze, Seoul (2023); the Young Congo Biennale (2019), Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) (2018); Palais de Tokyo, Paris; ARoS Aarhus, Denmark; 9th Berlin Biennale (2016); Poetics of Relation, LIYH, Geneva (2015)

Collections include: A4 Arts Foundation Cape Town, South Africa and the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. 

Dennis lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.