Lemkus Gallery is thrilled to announce our new artist-in-residence, Oupa Sibeko. Sibeko (b.1992, South Africa) is an interdisciplinary artist specialising in performance. His work employs his own body as a vehicle for numerous performative gestures that land within theatre, gallery, and academic settings. He holds a Bachelor of Art in Performance and Visual Arts from the University of Witwatersrand as well as a  Master of Fine Arts from the same institution. Throughout his artistic career, Sibeko has maintained an interest in ritual and play, specifically to affect relational encounters with the black male body— its pain, crystallisation, and negation in the history of representation. His practice draws from indigenous and cultural knowledge in working towards site-specific interventions in public and institutional spaces. 

Previous residencies and fellowships by Sibeko include, The Freezer Hostel and Theatre Residency 2015 (Reykjavík, Iceland); Thupelo Artist Residency at Greatmore Studios 2015 (Cape Town, South Africa); Owela Art Residency 2016-2017 (Windhoek, Namibia); Art Residency 2022 (Leipzig, Germany); Akedemie Schloss Solitude Fellowship 2023-2024 (Stuttgart, Germany); NIROX Foundation Residency 2024 (Johannesburg, South Africa). 

He has also been the recipient of several prestigious awards, such as: The Richard Haines Prize for All-Rounded Performer (2015); The David Koloane Art Award (2019); Mail & Guardian Top 200 Young South Africans (2019). In 2020 he was shortlisted for the Henrik Grohs Top 17 Artist Award. 

With the current residency project at Lemkus Gallery, Sibeko is intent on investigating surface materials as sites for different registers of play that manifest across installation, painting, drawing, video, and performance. Significant in this regard is the notion of play within acts of violence normalised in post-apartheid society. In this way, he is rethinking the capacity of time and material to find order in disorder and vis-versa.