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Bogosi Sekhukhuni Biography and critical analysis of his works

Dom Baca




Bogosi Sekhukhuni was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1991,He got his education at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa and is a founder of the 'tech-health artist group'. Throughout Bogosi life he has explored the ideas of what it means to be an African Artist in the digital world that relies heavily on western ideals. When asked about his, “African aesthetic” Sekhukhuni responded with, “The thing about an “African” aesthetic, specifically within the art world, is that the celebrated examples of this tend to exist as a response to a colonial heritage. Many of the established African artists working in Europe and the Americas present juxtapositions of western art history with the artist's own cultural heritage which to me is a tired thing. I can’t help but be influenced by how dominant American popular culture creeps its way into a global visual language of advertising and architecture and how that’s interpreted through regional cultures, and the snowballing of references that bloom as cultures evolve”. Bogosi’s pieces work with the idea of how to challenge institutional ideals of what electronic art aesthetics through cosmological and mystical compositions.

Sekhukhuni's Exhibition List:

Simunye Summit 2010 was his first solo exhibition with Stevenson (2017). His debut solo exhibition in the USA took place at Foxy production (2018). Recent group exhibitions include The Art Happens Here: Net Art’s Archival Poetics, New Museum, New York (2019); I Was Raised on the Internet at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2018); Afrotopia, Rencontres de Bamako: African Biennale of Photography in Mali (2017); Americans 2017 at Luma Westbau (2017); Art/ Afrique, le nouvel atelier at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2017); Full Disclosure at Steve Turner, Los Angeles (2016); the 2nd Kampala Biennale in Uganda (2016); the 9th Berlin Biennale, Germany (2016); the Dakar Biennale in Senegal (2016). In 2015 Sekhukhuni showed work as part of the 89+ Prospectif Cinéma programme at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Film Will Always Be You: South African Artists on Screen at Tate Modern, London; Co-Workers – Network as Artist at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; and Filter Bubble at the LUMA Foundation's Westbau in Zürich, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Simon Castets. Before that he participated in a number of group shows in South Africa, including In the night I remember (2013) and A Sculptural Premise (2014), both at Stevenson. His first solo show was Unfrozen: Rainbowcore at Whatiftheworld in Cape Town in 2014. With CUSS Group, Sekhukhuni was included in Private Spaces: Art After the Internet at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, in 2014.