Exhibitions

THE BEGINNING OF STORIES (PART 1 OF MANY)

December 2, 2017 - January 20, 2018

Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi

Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi’s The Beginning of Stories (Part 1 of many) will be on view from Saturday, December 2 through Saturday, January 20. She will also give a lecture at Vanderbilt University on Wednesday, January 10, 2018.

"There is a Zulu myth that says all stories come from the sea. The stories that flow through ‘The Beginning of Stories’ are stories from and about the sea. The sea that like water itself takes many forms: it is the Atlantic Ocean, which my father crossed after traversing the African continent in his exile from South Africa. It is the Black Sea, on whose shores my maternal grandparents lived, and the oceans they had to cross in their exile. It is the sea I crossed as a child, going somewhere I called home but had never been. These are stories of home that come from exile. Stories of flight, family and the imagined return to the source of stories, the mythical place where you belong." - Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi

About:

Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi was born in New York to a South African father in exile and a Greek-American mother. In 1992, two years before South Africa's first democratic elections, she moved with her family to Johannesburg. She is an artist who divides her time between studio work and navigating the field of art as social practice. Her work investigates power and its structures – political, social, architectural. Implicit in her examination of these structures is an interrogation of the invisible forces that create them, and an imagining of alternatives.

Her paintings and films have been shown at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg, the Ifa Gallery in Berlin, the South London Gallery and Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rio de and most recently at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Nkosi obtained her BA from Harvard University and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. She currently lives and works in Johannesburg.