gender / genre

Featuring: Boemo Diale, Eva Lundon, Láura Viruly, Kylie Wentzel, Moesha Magagula, Sepideh Mehraban, Sitaara Stodel, Swaline Mkhonto, Thulile Gamedze, Yolanda Mazwana, and Ronél de Jager.

We launch kumalo | turpin with two commitments: to the city we are part of, and to the artists who are remaking what contemporary practice can mean. This first newsletter marks both — the opening of Genre/Gender, our inaugural gallery exhibition, in our brand new physical space and a public art programme we have put into motion across Johannesburg’s recently-opened Nine Yards Precinct. bell hooks described education as a practice of freedom that "connects the will to know with the will to become" much like the new journey our new team are departing on. Please join us for a toast to open the gallery and continue this conversation.

The show brings together a bold and diverse range of women artists who are reshaping the visual and conceptual language of contemporary South African art. Working across painting, sculpture, and photography, these artists challenge, subvert, and reimagine both genre and gender as structures of meaning and modes of power.

The title plays on the slippage between categorisation and identity — artistic form and social role. Historically, genre has served to organise art just as gender has been used to organise people. In both cases, hierarchies have been enforced and deviations punished. The works we are presenting resist and reclaim those frameworks, refusing containment and asserting new terms of engagement.

The artists we have brought together confront inherited expectations about what women’s art should look like or speak to, forging instead their own aesthetic and political vocabularies. Some mine the canon, reworking traditional genres with irony or reverence; others construct new visual languages rooted in queer, diasporic, or embodied experience. Collectively, their work exposes how genre and gender intersect with race, class, sexuality, and history to shape how art is made, seen, and valued.

Genre/Gender is not a manifesto but a map — partial, shifting, and deliberately unresolved.