In his first institutional solo exhibition in Johannesburg, Nitegeka explores movement, displacement, and resilience through large-scale installation, painting, and film.
©️ Serge Alain Nitegeka. Courtesy of the artist and Stevenson, Cape Town & Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York. Photo credit: Nina Lieska
Wits Art Museum is currently presenting ‘Black Subjects’, an exhibition by South African-based artist Serge Alain Nitegeka, marking his first institutional solo show in Johannesburg. The presentation carries a particular poignancy for the artist, who has returned to his alma mater, where he completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2009.
Installed in the gallery space directly below his former student studio, ‘Black Subjects’ reconnects Nitegeka with the institution that shaped his early artistic development. The exhibition reflects on his ongoing engagement with themes of migration, labour, and endurance — ideas that have informed his practice for nearly two decades.
A Return to Site and Scale
At the centre of the exhibition is Structural Response V, a large-scale wooden installation that transforms the gallery into an immersive environment. Composed of intersecting black-painted beams, the structure invites visitors to walk through and around its shifting geometry.
The work extends Nitegeka’s long-running exploration of the relationship between body, space, and movement. Each iteration of the Structural Response series offers a choreography of passage, compelling viewers to navigate their own bodies within the work’s sculptural logic. Structural Response V has been exhibited internationally, including at the Grahamstown Arts Festival (2011), the French Institute in Dakar (2012), the Savannah College of Art and Design (2015), the Norval Foundation (2018), and the Nirox Foundation (2023–24). Its presentation at Wits Art Museum brings the series back to the city where the artist’s visual language first took form.
Black Subjects and Embodied Narratives
Also featured is Nitegeka’s film BLACK SUBJECTS (2012), in which anonymous figures dressed entirely in black move through geometric wooden frameworks reminiscent of his installations. Their careful, deliberate movements evoke the psychological and physical conditions of migration and displacement — gestures of endurance that parallel the artist’s own reflections on belonging.
A selection of paintings accompanies the installation and film, depicting silhouetted figures traversing abstracted landscapes. The figures appear burdened with indistinct cargo, evoking the weight of migration, both literal and symbolic. These works extend Nitegeka’s minimalist aesthetic into a meditation on anonymity, collectivity, and perseverance.
The Viewer as Participant
By entering and moving through the sculptural environment, visitors become part of the artwork. The structure requires each person to negotiate space, balance, and resistance, echoing the physical and emotional negotiations faced by those who move through restricted or unfamiliar terrain.
Through this interplay between structure and movement, ‘Black Subjects’ transforms the gallery into a living architecture of constraint and release. The work’s stark geometry, defined by planes of black and intersecting beams, heightens this embodied experience — abstraction made physical.
A Full-Circle Conversation
Nitegeka’s practice continues to engage with questions of identity, displacement, and adaptation, articulated through a rigorous language of abstraction and form. Born in Burundi and raised between Rwanda and South Africa, his work distills the experience of forced migration into precise, spatial encounters.
At Wits Art Museum, this exhibition completes a circle — from the student spaces where his practice began to the institutional stage where his vision returns in maturity. ‘Black Subjects’ reaffirms Nitegeka’s ability to translate deeply personal histories into universal visual experiences, reminding audiences that movement, whether voluntary or imposed, remains a defining human condition.
‘Serge Alain Nitegeka: Black Subjects’ is on view at Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg, until 1 November 2025. For more information, visit WAM.
