Deterritorialised Ontologies

Papendorp & other abstractions take # 2

2026, tracing paper, ink, paper, shoe polish, wood, 12 x 11cm

(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

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