ABOUT THE ARTISTS
James Webb is a conceptual artist, working with site-specific interventions and installations. His practice often involves sound, found objects, and text, invoking references to literature, cinema, and the minimalist traditions. By shifting objects, techniques, and forms beyond their original contexts and introducing them to different environments, Webb creates new spaces of tension. These spaces bind Webb’s academic background in religion, theatre, and advertising, offering poetic inquiries into the economies of belief and dynamics of communication in our contemporary world.
Group exhibitions include the 8th and 16th Biennale de Lyon (2007 & 2022), 13th Biennial of Dakar (2018), 4th Prospect Triennial of New Orleans (2017), Documenta 14 (2017), 13th Biennial of Sharjah (2017), 12th Bienal de la Habana (2015), 55th Biennale di Venezia (2013), and 3rd Marrakech Biennale (2009).
Dr. Hleze Kunju is a lecturer, speaker, researcher, author, actor, poet, and musician. He wrote Rhodes University’s first isiXhosa PhD thesis and received The Most Outstanding PhD Thesis Award by the African Language Association of Southern Africa.
Nombasa Maqoko is an Eastern Cape born, Makhanda based, singer / songwriter, performer, and podcaster. She is an academic with a degree in Ethnomusicology with Rhodes University. Her new EP, Nombasa, is being performed at this year’s festival in her concerts at the Thomas Pringle Hall.
Dr Dominique Santos’s work explores the intersections of music, play, dreaming, and heritage practices with intimate experiences of the self, space and social change. Her anthropological trajectory has been informed by a commitment to ‘unsettle the coloniality of being’, connecting the university as a public and intellectual space with the wider community and natural world it is part of.
Louis Viljoen is a Cape Town based playwright and director. He has written and produced numerous plays including, The Frontiersmen, Champ, Porno 88, The Kingmakers, The Pervert Laura, Oh Baby, I’m A Wild One, The Emissary, and The Eulogists. He is one of the creators (along with playwrights, Nicholas Spagnoletti and Jon Keevy) of the successful short-play initiative Anthology which has had four successful seasons at The Alexander Bar’s Upstairs Theatre.