donna Kukama's 'I Breathe, You Breathe' at Kunstinstituut Melly

South African artist donna Kukama's exhibition 'I Breathe, You Breathe' at Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam (11 Oct 2025 – 29 Mar 2026) challenges conventional archives through performance, drawing, painting, text, and sound. The title borrows from Doechii's 2024 song 'Denial Is a River' and aligns with the Combahee River Collective's 1977 statement. A poem by M. NourbeSe Philip at the entrance frames breath as personal, relational, and political. Kukama treats history as living and embodied, using non-linear storytelling to address coloniality, genocide, and violence. She draws on Black feminist thought, ancestral knowledge, and oral traditions, emphasizing presence over permanence. Her practice includes go kgapa, a Setswana technique of applying cowdung, clay, and water in circular gestures, which she calls mokwalo ('writing'). The project 'the history book for those who absolutely need to be remembered' creates living, impermanent infrastructures for memory. Kukama invites multiple breaths—of grandmothers, griots, oceans, rivers, lands, plants, spirits—as active participants in knowledge production. Performance is central to probing visibility and belonging, addressing bodies of knowledge rather than simply the body. Language appears incomplete or disrupted, exploring limits of English as a tool of power. The exhibition runs until 29 March 2026.