In ‘I Breathe, You Breathe’, donna Kukama reimagines history as something living, embodied, and collective. She reflects on breath as political metaphor, performance as knowledge, and the possibilities of remembering beyond the limits of the archive.
28 July 2026
History, for Donna Kukama, is not a fixed record waiting to be retrieved. It is something that breathes, shifts, and gathers meaning through bodies, landscapes, voices, and memory. In ‘I Breathe, You Breathe’, presented at Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam, the South African artist brings together performance, drawing, painting, text, and sound to challenge conventional ideas of the archive, proposing instead forms of remembrance rooted in relation, movement, and lived experience. Drawing on Black feminist thought, ancestral knowledge, oral traditions, and embodied practices, the exhibition asks what histories become possible when presence is valued over permanence, and when memory is allowed to remain incomplete, collective, and alive. Kukama discusses breath as a political language, the power of non-linear storytelling, and why some of the most enduring archives are those carried within the body rather than stored on the shelf.
Brendon Bell- Roberts: The title ‘I Breathe, You Breathe’ suggests that breathing is both personal and shared. How does breath shape your thoughts on memory, especially when considering forgotten, silenced, or omitted histories?
donna Kukama: The exhibition borrows its title from a line in Doechii’s 2024 song, Denial Is a River, but the exhibition is not necessarily about the song. Rather, it aligns more closely with the Combahee River Collective’s 1977 assertion that “if Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.” At the entrance to the exhibition is a short poem by M. NourbeSe Philip, which appears in the introduction to her 2018 essay, The Ga(s)P. In the poem, she states that we all begin life because someone breathed for us, and ends with the line “Everyone has had someone – a woman – breathe for them, Until that first ga(s)p, For air”. So yes, the exhibition title and opening poem allude to breathing as personal, relational, political, and shared. Working with breath as both material and metaphor has been transformative for my practice and thinking, and it has shifted and shaped how I approach memory and history. I think of every breath as containing traces of others who breathed before us, and continue to breathe through us. When looking for new grammars for writing histories that had been forgotten or silenced, I wanted to articulate invisibility without ending up with complete disappearance. I was looking for ways to articulate presence differently, where resilience and vulnerability coexist. Breath is therefore a vocabulary for speaking about presence and erasure simultaneously. It has allowed me to articulate certain histories without needing to reduce them to evidence or documentation instantly.
You often treat history as living rather than fixed. How do you practically approach history as a process that evolves in the present?
I treat history as living because this allows me to be an active witness and participant in its formation. I want to approach historical research as a process of listening and becoming, rather than uncritically extracting and regurgitating information. I want to know how rumours, landscapes, weather systems, dreams, collective memory, and other contributors make way for more interesting stories, because history itself was never about facts. It was always about power and perspective. When multiple temporalities do not belong to a fixed past, happening continuously, overlapping, and with no desire for a completed narrative, then history becomes a continuous and fragmented negotiation between past, present, and future. This positioning of a living history destabilises an often fixed “official history” by insisting on malleable and porous forms, and multiple experiences and points of view. It allows us to speak for ourselves in our own terms.
The exhibition weaves through fragments and memories rather than a clear timeline. Why do you choose non-linear storytelling for history?
Non-linearity comes as a result of allowing different registers to coexist in a non-hierarchial manner. It comes as a result of welcoming contradiction and uncertainty, and acknowledging forms of knowing and world-making that understand time differently. Fragmentation comes naturally, because it feels close to how memory itself operates. Instead of it being an aesthetic choice, I find fragmentation to be a useful tool for speaking specifically to the presence and aftermaths of coloniality, genocide, racial and sexual violence, and the historical and ongoing list of oppressive systems that bring about gaps and interruptions in people’s desire to breathe. The non-linearity disassembles violence as a structure, while the fragmentation diagnoses its effects on our lived realities.
Performance is central to your work. How does it specifically help you probe visibility, belonging, and public presence?
Performance has been central to my practice and research because it has allowed me to probe questions of visibility and presence when addressing not only historical erasures, but also how knowledge is produced. Rethinking history to move towards memory and storytelling began with questioning how certain forms of knowledge are “universally recognised” while other forms continue to be dismissed, primitivized, hollowed out in their meaning, or forced into a temporal, fleeting existence. I think of performance as a space where knowledge that is produced in, by, and through the body is present and visible. In my work, visibility and public presence are not about representation in simple terms. It is not “about the body”; it addresses bodies of knowledge. I am much more invested in creating new grammars for magnifying and amplifying different ways of encountering the world. I work with that which exceeds the capacity of words, because the precise language for the type of visibility I am articulating does not yet exist.
Language is present throughout the exhibition, often appearing incomplete, disrupted, or difficult to read. Why do the limits of language interest you, and how do you explore what other forms of knowledge might emerge beyond words?
I acknowledge that the English language, in many historical contexts, has been used as a tool for power and subjugation, but in my practice I am also interested in (the) language’s failures and limits. How do I articulate the collective grief that lingers after apartheid and colonial violence through the same language that struggles both to fully acknowledge the violences it enabled and to hold ancestral memory and spiritual encounters as forms of knowledge? In my drawings and paintings, which are made through texts I have written, rewritten, or deconstructed, I understand poetry as something that can dissolve into gesture. Through rhythm and repetition, I write the same sentence over and over until it loses immediate legibility. This process of accumulation makes room for opacity, allowing the written word to move toward something else. That “something else”, existing between gesture and text, is a re-membering of embodied technologies and ancestral practices known as go kgapa in my maternal language, Setswana. I owe my writing and storytelling to this rural practice, where a mixture of cowdung, clay, and water is rubbed onto surfaces such as floors and walls in circular repetitive gestures. This knowledge, passed primarily through women across generations, results in wavy patterns that are also referred to as mokwalo (which loosely translates to “writing”). Go kgapha or mokgapho is a form of knowledge that emerges beyond words, and a form of world-making rather than mere housekeeping. It is the antidote to legibility and positions of patriarchal power as the only way through which stories can be told. Through my performance practice, I actively work on broader literacies and bring attention to forms of intelligence that exist beyond the written and spoken word.
You focus on overlooked stories. How do you present these histories in ways that avoid simply archiving them as static records?
I am interested in the practice of writing memory otherwise, and while my idea of historical writing will always be an embodied and time-based practice, I am not at the centre of it. Instead, I invite multiple breaths at once, including the breaths of grandmothers, griots, healers, oceans, rivers, seas, other water bodies, lands, plants, aunts, spirits, sky, witches, heroines, labourers, and birthers as active participants in the production of knowledge and history. I have learnt to listen, and to allow myself to be constantly transformed, without chasing perfection or completeness. I want to create conditions for memory rather than merely collecting, storing, illustrating, or passing on information.
Your project, the history book for those who absolutely need to be remembered, proposes a new archival approach. How can artists actively shape the preservation of stories and memories?
I would feel uncomfortable prescribing how artists could navigate this complex space, but I can certainly share what drives my own creative impulses. Coming from a place where official archives have failed to account for the lived experience and forms of knowledge of the majority, I found myself dissatisfied with the education system, archives, memorials, monuments, and how history is “officially” told and preserved. The history book for those who absolutely need to be remembered was born out of a need to create living, impermanent infrastructures where memories can touch and affect each other in order to generate new knowledge. It does not follow the logic of preservation, but it respects that minor shifts and changes formed part of how oral traditions and ancestral technologies were passed on.
Breath, voice, sound, and movement create a living archive in the exhibition. What compels you to use ephemeral, embodied forms for archiving?
Permanence has never been neutral. To me, it represents forms of authority that have intentionally sought to exclude and invisibilise countless cultures that transmitted knowledge through embodied practices. The presence of voice, sound, movement, and breath creates a place of convergence that understands that sometimes memorials sing and weep, that the archive sweats, that architectures need to breathe, and historical texts walk among us.
This exhibition was on view at the Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam from 11 October 2025 until 29 March 2026.
