Thulile Gamedze

Thulile Gamedze is a Johannesburg-based cultural worker engaged in text, textile and history, and interested in the possibilities that emerge through the collapse of discipline. Through FOR THE AFTERLIFE, Thuli’s work with secondhand clothing and ‘the aftercycle’, prompts a broader artistic practice in conversation with textile ghosts, and the formal, political, historic and social meanings in (soft) design. Her ongoing social history project After Library, which piloted in Johannesburg in 2025, brings together people with garment design, situated reading, and practices of wear.

With an M.Phil in Fine Art from the University of Cape Town, Thuli has published extensively in art and academic platforms in areas from contemporary art and Southern African art history, to the aesthetics of radical movements, the politics and poetics of water, and pedagogical practices of the undercommons. Some of her significant art-related publications include texts for the catalogues for Documenta 14, the 10th Berlin Biennale, and iterations of Recontres’ de Bamako, and her academic publication record includes the South Atlantic Quarterly, Radical Philosophy and MARCH: Journal of Art and Strategy.

Thuli was a member of iQhiya, a collective of Black women artists, who actively exhibited between 2015 and 2018, including at documenta14: Learning from Athens. She is part of an ongoing collaboration with her sibling Asher Simiso, with whom she works and writes as gamEdze and gamedZe. Alongside Abri de Swardt, Thuli is a collaborator of Overnight Services, a queer project engaging the illogics of dreaming as a generative voice for the disruption of museums’ colonial order. Finally, performing as Ethan T. Smoke, Thuli is part of the Johannesburg-based drag collective Jozi Kings and Things.