Aïda Muluneh was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1974 where she currently lives. Aida left the country at a young age and spent an itinerant childhood between Yemen and England. After several years in a boarding school in Cyprus, she finally settled in Sasktchewan, Canada in 1985. In 2000, she graduated with a degree from the Communication Department with a major in Film from Howard University in Washington D.C. After graduation, she worked as a photojournalist at the Washington Post.
Muluneh’s work has has been exhibited internationally, and is included in a number of public collections.
Grant is a full-time practicing artist born and raised in the Elsies River suburb in Cape Town. As a recipient of the Lionel Davis Award in 2012, Grant completed a residency at Greatmore Studios in Woodstock before co-founding the interdisciplinary collective, Burning Museum. The collective worked with obscured narratives based on the histories and heritage of segregated people and made work that was mostly installed or painted in public spaces, from the District Six Museum in Cape Town to spaces in Benin, Germany and Spain. As a member of the DJ collective Future Nostalgia, the artist works with sonic archives looking back at cultural revolutions from music and art. Grant’s work as mural painter and graffiti artist with community projects, street art groups and cultural tours, has led to design exchange programmes and projects in Denmark, German, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. He participated in the Prohelvetia Swiss Arts Council exchange/residency in July 2022.
Artist Irma Stern, born to German Jewish parents, studied in Europe and spent the longest period of her time in the Cape from 1927-1966. Her reputation in the South African art world found greatest celebration in the 1950s and 1960s.
Lesiba Mabitsela is a South African interdisciplinary artist, designer and Fashion Practitioner currently based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Lesiba continues to explore the role of fashion designer/practitioner by incorporating fashion design with immersive technologies, critical fashion and performance studies resulting in interdisciplinary modes of engaging with and producing fashion. His work which regularly explores the subject of African masculine identities transforms the garment into an extension of one’s lineage communicating one’s history, culture, social hierarchy, aspirations whilst renegotiating relationships between the garment and the body.
Ongoing projects include REINSTITUTE – fashion collections and performance interventions to engage with African art collections and archives with the aim of rearticulating pre-colonial indigenous African dress as African fashion history instead of scientific artifact or art object – and The Cutting Room Project – a digital archive presented as an interactive storyboard which juxtaposes the construction of the three-piece suit with its site of making, whilst investigating the history of labour in South Africa’s garment manufacturing sector including their connections to the oppression of women of colour, and the legacy of Apartheid’s spacial planning. Lesiba’s practice is interwoven with his role as a consultant, academic and educator. He is the Co-Director of the African Fashion Research Institute (AFRI) which he founded in 2019 with Dr. Erica de Greef. AFRI advocates for critical fashion research from the African continent that is led by decolonial fashion theories and access to African fashion histories through digital means.
Lorin Sookool is a South African formally trained dance artist with an interdisciplinary practice encompassing performance, sound, film, installation and costuming. Her work is informed by an interest in exploring the role of the artist in contemporary society. Moving in and out of public and private spaces, her work is often participatory in nature.
Sookool often explores complex South African socio-political themes, with a focus on situations of racial, gendered, systemic and institutionalized violence. Sookool’s artistic practice and creative trajectory has its roots in a practice-based research that is intuitive in nature and has an emergent design. It follows a process-based approach that searches for the relationship between personal and collective themes, thereby becoming a reflective, reflexive, subject-centred practice.
Actress, performance artist, vocalist and theatre maker, Lukhanyiso Skosana, holds an Advanced Diploma in Theatre and is currently completing her Honours degree at UCT. Under the guidance of Dr Sara Matchett, Fitzmaurice voice-work, the Sanskrit system of “rasa”, body mapping and free writing became the foundation of her performance practice,. Lukhanyiso is an ancestral being, inhabiting the physical and metaphysical realm. Their performance work engages the body as site for generating images and narratives, while music sediments the ephemeral nature of their practice.
Lukhanyiso has performed at the ITFOK Festival (2018), National Arts Festival (2018) and University of Stellenbosch Woordfees (2019). Her work for Rehane Abrahams’s award-winning Womb of Fire won her a Fleur du Cap Award for Best Original Musical Score and Performance in 2019. She performed at the Institute for Creative Arts Live Art Festival in 2018 and 2019 and was an ICA Online Fellow during 2022, debuting a short film, The Exorcism of Mary Magdalene: A Sexual Resurrection. She presented The Exorcism of Mary Magadalene II: A Divine Intervention (2021) for the ICA Live Art Arcade, the National Arts Festival and the Turbine Art Fair (2021). Also in 2022 she produced the musical score for Isimo and Dwala Lam, short films by Sethembile Msezane, and she is currently participating in Manyano Media’s Black Girl Live Fellowship (2022). She is Black. Queer. Womxn. Femme. Radical. Godded. uNdlunkulu. Namaslay…
Qondiswa James is a cultural worker living in Cape Town, South Africa. She is an award-winning theatre-maker, performance artist, film and theatre performer, instillation artist, writer, arts facilitator and activist.
