About Us

It is with great honour and privilege to celebrate indigenous voices who with great honesty and artistic integrity have embarked on advancing the preservation of indigenous heritage. This work is cathartic and sometimes challenging, but yet affirming for a community who speaks from the periphery and yet with pride are joining many who have come before to lead the charge in the quest of self-fulfilment through the indigenous lens.

Southern Africa probably has the richest legacy of Rock Art in the world. Southern African rock art has been dated to be as old as 28 000 years and inevitably, this is the South African indigenous artform which needs no introduction. Very little has been published on the progression of this artistic practice and the evolution thereof. Evolution is a change in the characteristics of a species over several generations and relies on the process of natural selection. The Koena Art Institute has set on the exciting journey to explore art by contemporary indigenous descendants and how their practices essentially have continued through time. Sharing stories, expertise, art, ideas, and content intrinsic to the Contemporary South African indigenous descendant.

These contributions in the South African context are one which has been overlooked to a large extent. Creating the platform for indigenous stories and art has been at the forefront of our mission. What we see in constant flow is the honouring of these ideas and knowledge and through the celebration of our rich history and the merging within our current realities as artists, humans, and communities. Culture is dynamic and thus complex.

Culture is fluid rather than static, which means that culture changes all the time, every day, in subtle and tangible ways. With the focus on Afrocentric cultural positionality, we find that the perspectives shared through the exhibited artworks we are bound to celebrate the roots of indigenous beings, the ways these influence the contemporary means of storytelling and shared understandings of indigenous culture.

Indigenous arts are not stagnant and limited to rock art, but how artists are using their skills, indigenous knowledge systems and spirituality to inform and engage.

Lukretia Booysen – Curator