Based in Cape Town, Kemang Wa Lehulere is renowned for sculptures, performances and drawings that are inspired by South Africa’s collective history and his personal biography. As his major installation, I cut my skin to liberate the splinter 2017 is displayed and activated in the Tanks at Tate Modern, this is a unique opportunity to hear the artist discuss his acclaimed practice.
Kemang Wa Lehulere will be in conversation with art historian Professor Tamar Garb (UCL), and the event will be introduced by Kerryn Greenberg, Curator of International Art at Tate Modern.
Biography
Kemang Wa Lehulere
Kemang Wa Lehulere (b.1984, Cape Town) lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. Selected recent solo exhibitions include those at the Pasquart Art Centre, Biel (2018), MAXXI, Rome (2017), the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle, Berlin (2017), and the Art Institute of Chicago (2016), and his works have been included in the following group exhibitions and biennials: Performa 17, New York (2017); the 15th Istanbul Biennial (2017); Art/ Afrique, le nouvel atelier at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2017); the 8th Berlin Biennale (2014); Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2014); The Ungovernables, the second triennial exhibition of the New Museum, New York (2012); A Terrible Beauty is Born, the 11th Lyon Biennale at the Museum of Contemporary Art (2011) and When Your Lips Are My Ears, Our Bodies Become Radios at the Kunsthalle Bern and Zentrum Paul Klee. (2010). Wa Lehulere won the Malcolm McLaren Award, presented by Performa in 2017, was Deutsche Bank's 'Artist of the Year' 2017, the Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Arts in 2015, won the first International Tiberius Art Award Dresden in 2014, was one of two young artists awarded the 15th Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel in 2013, the recipient of the Tollman Award for the Visual Arts in 2012 and the MTN New Contemporaries Award in 2010, and the winner of the inaugural Spier Contemporary Award in 2007.
Tamar Garb
Tamar Garb is Durning Lawrence Professor in the Department of History of Art at University College London. A researcher of French art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Garb has published catalogue essays and books that address feminism, the body, sexuality, and gender in cultural representations. Garb has also written essays about contemporary artists such as Christian Boltanski, Mona Hatoum, Nancy Spero, and Massimo Vitali. Garb has organized several exhibitions, including Reisemalheurs at the Freud Museum in 2007 (on South African painter Vivienne Koorland), and Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2011. More recently, she has been researching and publishing on the history of art and photography in post-apartheid South Africa, including curating exhibitions on this subject (including Land Marks/Home Lands: Contemporary Art from South Africa at the Haunch of Venison Gallery in London in 2008). Garb's exhibition Figures and Fictions was nominated for a Lucie award in Curating.