Lungiswa Gqunta

Lungiswa Gqunta was born in 1990 in Port Elizabeth (now Gqeberha), South Africa, and is based in Cape Town. Her practice in performance, printmaking, sculpture, and installation engages with spatial politics, toxic environments, and the legacies of apartheid urban planning. Her most celebrated works involve pools — shallow basins filled with green gin-and-petrol or caustic liquid — whose gleaming, inviting surfaces conceal toxicity beneath beauty. These works engage directly with the geography of Gqunta's childhood, where green swimming pools were markers of white privilege in a society that denied Black residents access to public recreational space.

Gqunta's installations operate through a logic of seduction and revulsion: surfaces that attract the gaze and invite touch while making those very impulses dangerous. In this, they enact in aesthetic form the dynamics of a society built on exclusion and spatial apartheid — the ways in which access to comfort, pleasure, and public space was and continues to be racialized. The works function at a phenomenological scale, grounding their engagement with structural inequality in the direct experience of a body standing before an object.

Gqunta has exhibited widely across South Africa and internationally, including at the Istanbul Biennial and Manifesta and at galleries in London, New York, and Johannesburg. She received the Standard Bank Young Artist Award in 2020. Her work is held in collections including those of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa. She is represented by WHATIFTHEWORLD in Cape Town and AKINCI in Amsterdam.