Asanda Chuma Sopotela, South Africa

Lives and works in Capetown

In the bruised body of Asanda Chuma Sopotela, memory bleeds, ritual fractures, and the politics of care unravel — exposing the raw, unsettled wounds of history and desire. Her performances are acts of fearless reckoning: intimate confrontations where flesh becomes a fragile battlefield, and silence breaks under the weight of untold stories. Grounded in ancestral pain and feminist fire, she drags the ghosts of gender, power, and unspoken trauma into the harsh light — forcing audiences to feel what they cannot look away from.

She moves between worlds — the cold white cube of the gallery and the cracked earth of Eastern Cape,the townships — bringing her body as a living archive of resistance and renewal. Her work is not gentle. It is a provocation, a wound, a whispered scream that unsettles comfort and demands transformation.

In asking you to witness, she also witnesses herself — a relentless cycle of vulnerability and strength, of unmasking and becoming.

Awarded the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Performance Art in 2018, Sopotela shatters the boundaries of what it means to bear witness, making the invisible visible — and impossible to forget.

Asanda Chuma Sopotela. Acts of Kindness. Live Art Festival. Institute for Creative Arts (University of Capetown), 2024. Courtesy the artist.