Performance artist

When artist Donna Kukama applied to the then Pretoria Technikon in the late 1990s for an industrial design course, she was shunted into an engineering class. She lasted half a year, dropping out when classes focused on nuts and bolt’s and instead moved into art.

Upon completion of her degree she had a mostly unhappy stint at her alma mater teaching “drawing and photoshop” so she quit to study for a master’s of art in the public sphere at the Ecole Cantonale d’Art du Valais in Sierre, Switzerland. She has been at Wits University since last year and her experience there is infinitely more exciting.

Together with curator Gabi Ngcobo, she is “inventing a course that doesn’t exist”; the two co-teach curating and performance as a protest art. Meanwhile, with artist Kemang wa Lehulere, Kukama is working on what they call a “fictionary” of Johannesburg — a document concerned with the history and memory of the city.

— Percy Zvomuya

Twitter: @donnakukama