Kalashnikovv Gallery at RMB Latitudes Art Fair 2025

Kalashnikovv Gallery is proud to present a curated booth at RMB Latitudes 2025, featuring a selection of works that traverse abstraction, landscape, and portraiture. The presentation brings together the diverse yet deeply interconnected practices of Abongile Sidzumo, Khaya Witbooi, Yolanda Mazwana, Bastiaan van Stenis, Ronél De Jager, Thando Phenyane, Nathaniel Sheppard III, Joe Paine, Boemo Diale, Dominique Cheminais, Theresa-Anne Mackintosh, and Mbali Tshabalala. Each artist contributes a vital voice to an overarching curatorial narrative that centres on self-inquiry, identity formation, and the resilience of personal and collective being in the face of socio-political volatility.

In an age marked by ongoing cultural fragmentation, technological acceleration, and psychological reverberations, the question of how we anchor the self becomes more urgent than ever. The works on show respond to this tension—some through radical abstraction that gestures toward interior landscapes and fragmented memory, others through portraiture that captures emotional states, generational trauma, and embodied histories. Landscape, as both metaphor and motif, appears throughout the booth as a space of projection, displacement, and return.

The unifying thread across the works is an unflinching commitment to the exploration of self—often fractured, in flux, or in the process of reconstruction. These are not simply self-portraits or diaristic gestures, but sophisticated engagements with what it means to navigate, assert, and sometimes reinvent identity within contemporary South African society.

The artists address themes such as black subjectivity, gender and queer politics, mental health, urban alienation, and the inherited tensions of post-colonial and post-apartheid experience. There is also a strong awareness of the global moment, as these artists engage both critically and emotionally with the pressures of the current world—climate crises, surveillance capitalism, forced migration, and cultural erasure—while holding on to deeply personal, localised expressions of identity.

From the textured, psychological expressions of Yolanda Mazwana, to the layered, archival modes of resistance in Nathaniel Sheppard's collage-like paintings; from the surreal terrains of Ronél De Jager to the provocations of Boemo Diale’s multidisciplinary work, each artist presents a unique language of self-representation. Collectively, they offer a multiplicity of voices that refuse categorisation –– a powerful cross-section of contemporary South African art that is both introspective and expansive, poetic and politically resonant.

Through this presentation, Kalashnikovv Gallery reaffirms its commitment to showcasing artists whose practices are deeply rooted in critical discourse and emotional urgency. The booth stages a conversation—between mediums, generations, and lived experiences—about what it means to exist, create, and resist in the present moment. This is art as self-examination, art as confrontation, and ultimately, art as survival.

This show runs from 21st - 25th of May 2025.