Recognising the historical underrepresentation of women in the country's visual arts, Renée's curatorial work places particular emphasis on amplifying female and feminist voices while championing emerging contemporary artists. Through strategic mentorship, curation, and advocacy, she seeks to expand the visibility and international reach of Botswana's artists.

Mentoring and capacity-building of the artist-professional are intrinsic to her curatorial work. In her role as Philately Art Advisor to BotswanaPost’s Philatelic Stamp Programme for over 4 years (2017-2020), she was responsible for the artistic oversight of the country’s national stamp-issuing programme and, in turn, for the development of world-class illustrators in this specialised field of philatelic art. 

She currently sits on the Board as Vice Chairperson of the International Committee of Museums (ICOM) Botswana, is a board member of the Art Residency Centre based in Gaborone, Botswana, and is the founder of the Rising Stars Studio Mentorship and Residency programme, a hybrid incubator programme based in Gaborone. This year, for the 2026 CuratorLab, Renée has been invited to participate as a guest mentor. 

Botswana’s contemporary art scene is growing, with a new generation of artists, curators and creative practitioners contributing to an increasingly connected ecosystem. At the centre of this development is Renée Eisen-Khonat, founder and director of ReCurate, an independent curatorial and art consultancy practice based in Botswana.

With more than two decades of experience across the country’s creative industries, Eisen-Khonat’s practice spans curation, mentorship, artist development and advocacy, with a particular commitment to amplifying women and feminist voices.

As a guest mentor for the 2026 RMB Latitudes CuratorLab programme, Latitudes speaks to Eisen-Khonat about the evolution of Botswana’s contemporary art scene, the importance of building sustainable opportunities for artists, and what it takes to strengthen connections between Botswana and the wider African art ecosystem.

LO: Your curatorial practice is rooted in amplifying the voices of women and feminist artists in Botswana. What first made you realise this was work that urgently needed to be done?

REK: Creating opportunities to promote women artists and work that spoke to women-centric themes became a focus very early in my career because I was a practising artist at the time, and because I personally didn’t see anyone specifically championing female artists in the early 2000s. As a curator, much of what informs my work is seeing through the lens of an artist, because I do consider myself to have been an artist first before I became involved in art management and curatorial practice. 

At the outset of my curatorial work, I fast realized that the majority of the artists at the gallery I was working in as a curator were male, and when our female artists presented works for sale or exhibition, the works did not sell as well. I soon surmised that our female artists’ work was more conceptual and challenging than the work of their male counterparts, which at the time was met by a local audience who did not appreciate the messaging and aesthetics behind their work. “Pretty pictures” was the order du jour. Our female artists often used their art to address or express social and personal issues, such as stigmatisation of HIV, gender-based violence or gender-based bias, the abuse of power in all forms, racial and identity issues, women’s worth and their work, to name but a few. In doing so, oftentimes their work was labelled as not “marketable” for our local art buyers, or “too feminist” in nature and did not receive the local representation or support it is worthy of. 

It was clear that more opportunities were needed not only to promote the work of our female artists, but to engage our local audiences - through exhibitions and art talks - in a discourse about the purpose of art as a social and personal voice which sometimes needs to speak to uncomfortable and difficult topics. I am pleased to say that our female artist trailblazers have etched a good road ahead for today’s young female artists who ride on their shoulders and are making their mark on the current art scene within and outside of our borders. 

LO: Over more than two decades, you've witnessed Botswana's contemporary art scene evolve. What changes have been the most encouraging, and where do you still see opportunities for growth? 

REK: To begin with, and following on from your first question, it is very exciting to see that there are now more practising, professional female artists working in Botswana, and that overall there have been great strides made in more equitable representation and growth in not only the marketability of female artists’ work, but the market value of their work.

Additionally, when I first started working in this industry, very few artists were fortunate enough to study art (be it in the visual arts or any other art discipline), and as such the technical proficiency and acumen of the average young artist was usually limited to a high school education-level of training. This stymied the development of the arts all round. Two decades later, with the onset of self-learning and upskilling through the internet, more art students being able to train outside of the country through government or self-funding, and with the growing societal acceptance of professional art as a viable career choice, we see an abundance of raw talent emerging in the last decade, especially since COVID. There is also a greater consumption of and appreciation for the arts locally, which is wonderful. It means that there is a growing audience for our artists. 

That said, a growing audience doesn’t equate to a growing consumer or collector base locally. We still find that our artists’ work sells better in South Africa than at home. Art as a valuable, appreciable asset is still something that we as art advisors, curators, and agents are working hard to instil into our buyers and our local audience. Botswana is a very young art scene and market, so I do believe this appreciation will come in time; in the meantime, we who sell artwork have the responsibility to carefully nurture the market, collectors, art patrons, and build slow but steady market value in our artists’ work.

I think another area that also still proffers opportunities for growth in Botswana's contemporary art scene is that of access to more varied materials. Currently, we don't have a lot of artists working in the discipline of sculpture. We don't have a foundry, and the level of expertise in this area is limited. Traditional printmaking, ceramics, to name a few more, are also under-explored as processes. There are various different artistic disciplines that our artists haven't had the opportunity to be exposed to, and I believe that if we can create access to these different materials and processes, we will open up such wonderful forms of expression that have yet to be explored locally. 

Ngozi Lebogang Chukura, The Void - Artist represented by ReCurate.

LO: Through ReCurate, you've championed both established practitioners and emerging artists. What draws you to an artist's practice, and what makes you believe in their long-term potential? And how has your eye changed since you first started curating?

REK: This is a very interesting question, which really does touch on the question of whether or not a curator’s personal taste and preference impacts their choice of artists to represent, and if it should. None of us is absolutely objective or impartial, I think, and especially if you have a basis in making art oneself, there will surely be certain artists whose work you'll intuitively tend to resonate with…there'll be certain artists whose work just excites you and your own personal aesthetic. So, yes, there are those aspects, but I try not to allow my personal preference to dictate what draws me to any particular artist’s work. I try to, first of all, look at the quality of the work from a technical and a material perspective, and gauge the artist’s potential for long-term development, if it's an emerging artist. If it's a mid-career artist who approaches me to represent them or to try and sell their work, I look at their collector base, where they've come from (in terms of previous representation), how they're potentially developing their oeuvre, what they hope to achieve as they continue their practice, and how I could fit into that plan potentially.

And then, in terms of what brings me to seeing long-term potential in an artist, especially emerging and young artists, is a certain quality that I can't easily name…it’s just an ability, whether it's learned or self-taught, to move or impact me somehow. 

What has changed over the years for me is being able to not just respond emotively to an artist's work because I like it, but looking at what the artist potentially will bring to our local ecosystem; if there’s scope for growth – can we foresee an ability to grow their practice and develop their process; are we going to be able to give them an audience locally and outside of this country; what are they bringing to our art scene that potentially is not there currently; and how do they add to it? A unique voice or artistic perspective is key, as well as the prospect of bringing a unique or fresh narrative to, perhaps, corporate collections, institutional representation, and cultural/national representation?

It's not so much about what they're selling, but what they have to say through their work, and how they're saying it. So that's shifted for me over the years, whereas I think when I first started, I really focused a lot on technical aspects of the work – “developed” potential rather than “development” potential. 

LO: Much of your work is about building an art ecosystem, not just staging exhibitions. What do you think is needed to strengthen Botswana's art market and deepen connections across the African continent? 

REK: There's still so much work that's needed to strengthen and expose our art market to our regional neighbours and the contemporary African market at large. What I believe would strengthen the visibility and market value of our artists' work is precisely through deepening connections across the African continent. I do believe that it is contingent on the work of Art curators, galleries, and agents to represent artists from Botswana at major art fairs, especially those that are most accessible to us in South Africa, such as the RMB Latitudes Art Fair. But the reality is that representation, especially in continental and international art fairs, is very difficult to access because the costs involved in participating in these are extremely inhibitive. And so I do believe that there should be regional, and, hopefully, even continental gallery collaborations, and joint cross-regional exhibitions. I would love to see institutions across the continent do exchange exhibitions, collaborative travelling exhibitions. These are the kind of questions I hope our national arts councils and perhaps even corporate patrons that have regional bases can help us answer – how do we strengthen cultural trade to build and bridge access to continental markets for artists? How can we mobilise actionable frameworks to bring access to new markets across the continent? 

While these questions sometimes seem insurmountable, on the upside, there are now also equally great opportunities for our artists now that certain barriers have been removed through online open art residency calls that allow our artists to work in the Global South, other parts of Africa, as well as the Global North. These expose our artists to new ideas, new ways of making, as well as to expose themselves and their work to new networks and audiences. So, there are continued efforts to encourage and assist our artists to take advantage of those opportunities.

I will also just use this question’s opportunity to put out a little wish and hope of mine that one day soon, Botswana will be able to have representation at the highest, ultimate level – namely the Venice Biennale – which I believe will go a long way in establishing credibility and visibility not only in the eyes of our fellow African audience, but to a global audience. 

Naledi Maifala, That little goat that went missing, 2026 - Artist represented by ReCurate.

LO: For audiences outside Botswana who may be discovering its contemporary art scene for the first time, is there an artist, movement or perspective you think deserves greater attention - and why?

REK: Goodness, so many! I am particularly excited about the interest and curiosity that I see growing slowly but surely regionally and internationally in our local artists and in Botswana itself. This is a testament to the hard work of a handful of artists who have made their mark on the international art scene, such as Meleko Mokgosi, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, as well as artists such as Thero Makepe, and the Botswana Pavilion, the collective he’s a founding member of. I’d love to also mention the mavericks who set our contemporary art scene into motion from the “90s to date - the work of Philip Segola, Ann Gollifer, and Neo Matome, who championed conceptual art and material and research-led process. Today, we have new, exciting up-and-coming artists who straddle genres, from contemporary explorations of classicism, expressionism, and impressionism to artists who continue to hone and explore a mixed-media material practice. Naledi Maifala (last year’s ANNA Award recipient), Katlego Twala (the breakout star artist of the 2025 RMB Latitudes’ Botswana Focus pavilion), and Diablo LaGuerta (who was also selected as an emerging artist-curator in the 2024 iteration of RMB Latitudes CuratorLab) are but a few notable artists making waves in the art scene. The list can go on and on. 

What is exciting to see in the current art scene in Botswana is the investigation of “self” as subject, and who that self is in the narrative of the world immediately around them, in an African context, and in a global context, and how self is shaped by or despite the influences of familial, national and cultural identity. So while we don't have maybe a particular art movement that you can say typifies Botswana’s art scene, we can see a tapestry of varied experiences that speak to a narrative of shared experiences of “being and becoming” in this extremely unique country in the central part of Southern Africa that was really built upon the very idea of coming together as a people to build a nation out of virtually nothing, hand-in-hand with people from countries that surround it, regionally, countries that surround it extra-continentally, because we understood that we needed to build from scratch together. That rich background informs the rich variety and messaging in the work of our artists who have been nurtured being a part of this very unique cultural, political and economic story that is Botswana. 

LO: As a mentor for this year's RMB CuratorLab programme, you'll be guiding the next generation of curators. If you could offer one piece of advice to an emerging curator just beginning their journey, what would it be?

REK: Beyond the artwork, see the artist. While art is a commodity, it is a very unique commodity because it represents, I hope, the soul of a person. In the ensuing era of intelligent machines and AGI, what will set work created by a human apart from AI is precisely that aspect of the human soul. Connect with the artist beyond the aesthetics of the work. While aestheticism, constructed meaning and messaging in the work are important, understanding the person behind the work, and encouraging their practice from that place of understanding, will help not only curate and sell their work, but build trust and loyalty between you and the artists for the long-term. 

LO: Any works currently on Latitudes Online that you're eyeing for your own collection? ;) 

REK: Oh, to win the lottery! I’m eyeing a lot, but, alas, most of what I love is beyond my current credit line with my hubby! Anything by Kay-Leigh Fisher, whose work I first came across and fell in love with at an exhibition at the Bag Factory in 2024. I’m also a huge fan of Andrew Kayser, and if I had a cool R85,000 sitting around, I would snap up his Moonlight. I love Ronél de Jager and Adele van Heerdan’s work, so I’m always watching and waiting for the “right” work (ahem) from them. I am building a collection of prints and am particularly interested in collecting the late greats of Artist Proof Studio, especially David Tsoka, Bheki Sibiya, and Thokozani Madonsela. 

Some of Renée Eisen-Khonat’s Personal Artwork Picks on Latitudes Online: