BODE presents Chuma Adam's debut solo show "What is here, has always been here, and always will be". She asserts Blackness not as an oppositional reaction to an imperial gaze, but as autopoiesis: an autonomous, self-actualizing reality produced entirely on its own terms.
BODE is pleased to present Chuma Adam’s debut solo exhibition "What is here, has always been here, and always will be". Within "What is here, has always been here, and always will be", Chuma Adam (b. 2001) asserts Blackness not as an oppositional reaction to an imperial gaze, but as autopoiesis: an autonomous, self-actualizing reality produced entirely on its own terms. Marking a fundamental evolution in her practice, Adam shifts her theoretical inquiry from a present-tense act of self-creation ( “how do I make myself?” ) to a deep ancestral excavation ( “what am I made of, by whom, and for how long?” ). What emerges is not the singular, isolated subject inherent in Western hegemonic anthropocentrism, but a luminous continuum of lineage, territory, and collective consciousness. Positioned between ontology and epistemology, her practice opens to liminality: a space where the boundaries of what is known, and what demands to remain unknown, are continuously reconfigured.
Profound and thorough engagement with both practice and theory resonates throughout Adam’s work; a transdisciplinary investigation that materializes a vast array of Pan-African philosophers, writers and thinkers. Deeply informed by Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation , Adam’s practice claims an uncompromising right to opacity: the right to remain visible without surrendering to immediate institutional legibility. Her psychosomatic mark-making is an intense, physically demanding performance where the body-mind acts as a conduit for matter and memory. Controlled yet emotive brushstrokes consume the surface in an infinite, rhythmic sea of gestures. By building her compositions upon umbhaco , the dense cotton material traditionally used in Xhosa attire, and incorporating raw soil gathered directly from her mother’s garden, Adam constructs a physical substrate of generative tension. Here, academic theory yields to inherited knowledge, transforming the canvas into an embodied site of ancestral endurance.
Expanding beyond the achromatic discipline of her foundational work, Adam introduces sweeping, pulsating color fields of atmospheric dusk-blue and electric teal. Sourced directly from the Eastern Cape, the vivid teal pigment honors a deeply personal legacy: her grandmother’s annual ritual of coating her home in a blend of natural pigment and limewash. Impermanent, transient, and endlessly renewed, the deeper blues evoke the atmospheric presence of mountain ranges and open skies at dusk, channeling quiet tragedy, nostalgia, and spiritual duration. These vast tonal planes evoke the emotional gravity and monumental quiet of mid-century Color Field abstraction, operating with a distinctly Rothko-esque resonance: immersive sensory thresholds that mesmerize.
Within these expansive fields, animist folk tales and Xhosa folklore serve as Adam’s primary archive. Narratives that explicitly assert the agency of the non-human world position the environment as an inseparable aspect of identity. Rather than playing with mere illegibility, Adam’s mark-making evolves into an encrypted syntax, a language meant to be decoded by those who carry the shared memory of its signs. Historical tenses collapse into an undivided, entangled whole; the past, present, and future resisting separation. The self emerges here not as a temporary arrival, but as a quiet testament to what was, what is, and what will forever endure.
Chuma Adam (b. 2001, South Africa) is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, printmaking, textiles, and drawing. Adam’s practice critically engages the material-discursive and psychic dimensions of Blackness and womanhood. Adam rejects the institutional tendency to explore Blackness through imperial lenses, exploring Blackness as a complex structure produced on its own terms, not in relationality to whiteness.
Adam holds an Honours Degree in Fine Arts (2024) from the University of the Witwatersrand and forms part of the female-led collective VETO. The artist was shortlisted twice for the Wits Young Artist Award (2022, 2023) and named among Business Day Wanted Magazine's Young and Vital Artists for 2024. Solo exhibitions include: 2026 What was here, has always been, and always will be , Bode Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa (2026). Select group exhibitions include: Volta Art Fair, 99 Loop Gallery, Basel, Switzerland (2026); If There's A Book You Want To Read, Then Write It , RMB Latitudes Art Fair, VETO Art Collective, Johannesburg, South Africa (2026); The Joburg Group Show , Vela Projects, Cape Town, South Africa (2026); Holding, Still , 99 Loop Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa (2026); Milieu , Bode Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa (2026); Investec Cape Town Art Fair, 99 Loop Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa (2026); Autopoiesis , Blank Projects, Cape Town, South Africa (2025); Frequencies of the Otherwise , RESERVOIR, Cape Town, South Africa (2025); Blink , 99 Loop Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa (2025); Gestures , 99 Loop Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa (2025); Gibela , FEDE Arthouse, Cape Town, South Africa (2025); Modern Matriarchs , Windsor Gallery, Lagos, Nigeria (2024); The Anthropology of Blackness , Kalashnikovv Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa (2024); RMB Latitudes Art Fair, Dapaah Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa (2023).
Adam’s work is held in private collections in Switzerland, South Africa, South Korea, USA, France, UK, Qatar, Denmark and Nigeria. The artist lives and works in Hartbeestpoort, South Africa.