Akissi Beukman is an artist practising in Pretoria, South Africa.
She specializes in performance art, experimental sound art and painting.She works with colloquiality and volatility, symbolizing the silencing and warping of one’s own voice). Currently her work focuses on the expressions of personhood and the practice of art is a reflection on the state of being.
She is heavily influenced by notions of performativity in terms of gender, race and the politics that surround, influence and engage with her body: expressing spiritual healing with art.
Her work ‘Mind Unconditional’ is part of the Sasol New Signatures 100 collection (2017). Her work has been exhibited during the National Arts Festival (2015-2018) and her piece ‘Speaking Sound’ was performed at the Arts Lounge located in Makhanda at RAW gallery as a part of the research team Arts of Africa and the Global Souths (SARChI) during the National Arts Festival in Makhanda (February 2018). She has also exhibited her performance installation piece ‘MI NOUAN’ at Youngblood gallery for First Thursdays and for Intimate Theatre in Cape Town (2019) and is currently exhibiting the same piece at the ZEITZ MOCAA as part of the ‘Home Is where the Art is’ exhibition.
Most recently she was one of fourteen artists selected to attend the Tankwa Artscape residency in the Western Cape (2022) in which she presented two different performance pieces about her ancestral roots on sacred land.
