David Krut Artspace is thrilled to announce our participation at 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in collaboration with Kalashnikovv Gallery.
HOURS
Thursday, May 8 | VIP Preview 11:00am – 7:00pm
Friday, May 9 | VIP Preview 11:00am – 7:00pm
Saturday, May 10 | 11:00am – 7:00pm
Sunday, May 11 | 11:00am – 6:00pm
Friday, May 9th, 10:00am | VIP Exhibition walkabout at David Krut Artspace New York
Location:
Halo, 28 Liberty Street
New York, New York 10005
Alongside Kalashnikovv Gallery, we will be presenting a selection of works by Boemo Diale, Phumulani Ntuli, Abongile Sidzumo, and Richard Hart at Booth #21. A further selection of works from David Krut Workshop will be on view at Booth #22.
Kalashnikovv Gallery is a contemporary fine art gallery in Johannesburg and Cape Town, with a project space dedicated to providing a platform to both emerging and established South African artists. They are committed to discovering and nurturing new artists with fresh visions, who often need even stronger support to gain recognition beyond the African continent. Since we share these goals, we are delighted to be collaborating at the fair.
1-54 is the first and only international fair dedicated to contemporary African art. With three editions per year — in London, New York and Marrakech, 1-54 is the leading global art fair committed to providing visibility to contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora. Striving to promote a community of diverse perspectives, including evolving interpretations of the diasporic experience, 1-54 features leading international galleries specializing in contemporary African art alongside artists talks, panel discussions and a Special Projects program. The fair’s name draws reference to the fifty-four countries that constitute the African continent.
On view, Booth #21
Boemo Diale (b. 2000) is a multi-disciplinary artist who grew up navigating complex racial and socio-political post-apartheid structures in Rustenburg, Mafikeng and the suburbs of Johannesburg as a young mixed-race woman. As an exploration of identity, generational trauma, dreams and manifestations, the artist’s practice is both highly personal and speaks to the broader cultural inheritance of South African women. Diale’s visual narration takes on a dream-like articulation, her figures often appear caught within the confines of a vessel or pushed up against the borders of her painted surface. Diale’s work on film and on canvas is strongly impacted by her desire to connect with her maternal lineage and tell the inter-generational story of African women.
David Krut Workshop continues its working relationship with Phumulani Ntuli (b. Soweto, 1986), a South African multidisciplinary artist working with mixed media collages, sculpture, video, performance, installation, and research. His research-led practice, working between documentary and fiction, gathers archival materials which he both theoretically and practically collages together to explore historical gaps in archives and how these inform our narratives.
Abongile Sidzumo (b. 1996) works with leather offcuts and repurposed materials to create works that reflect and interrogate humanity, the way we co-exist and our relationship with nature; he revisits memories and connects them to spaces he has lived in as well as the everyday life of marginalised communities. Through his process of restitching and weaving the leather, Sidzumo proposes that we start thinking about leather’s conceptual and material value in a different way. Connecting leather to notions of the traumas that have been inflicted on black communities during apartheid, his practice also functions as a manner of interrogating the continuous healing of black communities in post-apartheid South Africa.
Richard Hart (b. 1968) is a Brooklyn-based South African artist. Though Hart’s cross-disciplinary work includes collage, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, video, photography, and installation, he considers himself primarily a painter. At the heart of his work is a sincere engagement with themes of memory, spirituality, ritual, religion and magic, considered through the lens of a sort of idealized vision of Africa and what might be considered Africanness. His works center neither figuration nor abstraction, but seem to actively engage with chance and unexpected juxtapositions, functioning more as inventories of process and fevered artistic exploration than as pure image-making.
On view, Special Projects Wall (Booth #22)
Aïda Muluneh (b. Addis Ababa, 1974) photographs striking, stylised portraits which explore the realities and imagined narratives of postcolonial Africa. Using bold face paint, symbolic garments, and vibrant backdrops, Muluneh’s female subjects evoke complex expressions of daily life, gender, and identity—particularly rooted in her home city, Addis Ababa. Her experiences across Yemen, England, Cyprus, Canada, and the United States deeply inform her practice, bridging the documentary with the conceptual.
Mary Sibande (b. 1982) is an artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, photography, and printmaking. Her work boldly interrogates the legacy of apartheid and colonialism in South Africa, with a particular focus on reclaiming the Black female body and voice in public and artistic discourse. At the heart of Sibande’s practice is the figure of “Sophie,” her alter ego and central protagonist. Clad in elaborate Victorian-inspired gowns made of domestic worker uniforms, Sophie traverses dreamlike, often surreal worlds. Through Sophie, Sibande reimagines the roles and identities historically imposed on Black South African women. Sophie is simultaneously a maid, a queen, a general, a spiritual leader, and more—an imaginative force who confronts societal constructs and asserts agency, dignity, and complexity.
William Kentridge (b. 1955, Johannesburg) is a multidisciplinary artist – a printmaker, painter, sculptor, director of theatre and opera, a draughtsman, animator and filmmaker. One might call him a maverick of the arts for the unparalleled ways in which he combines old and new artistic mediums, such as film and charcoal. While he does not define himself as a “political artist,” Kentridge is widely regarded as the go-to contemporary South African artist whose work cannot be detached from his country’s recent history and fraught present.
For more information or to request a catalogue, please contact us.