Serge Alain Nitegeka presents Black Subjects, his first institutional solo show in Johannesburg, opening on Tuesday, 26 August 2025 at the Wits Art Museum. Nitegeka returns to his alma mater, where as a student, his studio was located in a space above the main gallery, now repurposed into offices.
For Black Subjects, Nitegeka stages a monumental sculptural intervention almost directly below this formative location, re-engaging with an institution that has been instrumental in his practice and thinking over two decades.
Black Subjects is a conversation between body and space
Assembled in Johannesburg for the first time, Structural Response V is a labyrinthic structure of painted black beams stretching across the space and posing an inquiry on the relationship between the body and its surroundings, as well as narratives of forced migration.
Structural Response V is a continuation of a series of large-scale installations, forming part of Nitegeka’s Black Subjects exhibition. The artist offers choreography to his audience, as they walk along a predetermined pathway that weaves through the landscape of sharp lines and form.
Working across painting, sculpture and video, Nitegeka grounds his practice in a language of abstraction, geometry and colour. The experiential interaction with the work refutes passivity, resulting in a congruence between the body and space.
The structural embodiment of the migrant experience
In his paintings, figures carry unidentified cargo, moving across a landscape of abstracted obstacles. Nitegeka renders cargo and the personal effects of migration into a language of abstract thought and form, emphasising the liminality embedded in these narratives.
The installation can be seen in relation to Nitegeka’s 2012 film BLACK SUBJECTS, which features a group of anonymous performers dressed in black, who negotiate their bodies and objects through structures which function as obstacles to their movement.
Their advancement through the space is not characterised by individual progress, but also through the negotiation of mobility as a group. Nitegeka says that these figures embody “anonymity and universality of forced relocation,” further mirrored across the works on show.
The artist invites the audience to embody these anonymised black subjects as they interact with the installation and proceed through an obstructive, but not impossible, structure. As the audience is transformed into the black subjects, the installation-performance exemplifies the ways the body becomes cargo and continues the artist’s reflections on his experiences of forced migration and displacement.
About the artist
Serge Alain Nitegeka was born in Rwanda in 1983 and is currently based in Johannesburg.
Known for his large-scale structural installations, Nitegeka’s work draws on his own history as a refugee, figuratively and literally erecting barriers, obstacles, and borders both visual and physical for the viewer to traverse. Conjuring unsettling abstracted, obstruction-laden landscapes, Nitegeka evokes the psychological experience of political displacement and statelessness.
In addition to seven solo exhibitions at Stevenson in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Amsterdam (2012-22), Nitegeka has exhibited at Marianne Boesky Gallery and Boesky East in New York (2014-25); SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia (2015); and Le Manège gallery, French Institute, Dakar (2012).
Nitegeka won the 2019 Grant-Award, from the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation; the 2018 Villa Extraordinary Award for Sculpture by the Claire & Edoardo Villa Will Trust; the 2010 Tollman Award for the Visual Arts, and in the same year was selected for the Dakar Biennale, where he won a Fondation Jean Paul Blachère prize.
Visit the exhibition
The exhibition was opened on Tuesday, 26 August 2025 by Professor David Andrew from Wits School of Arts Fine Arts Department. Email [email protected] for any further enquiries.
Cost: Free entry
When: Exhibition is showing from 26 August to 1 November 2025. Visitors are welcome during the Art Museum’s opening hours, which are: Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 4pm
Where: Wits Art Museum, University of the Witwatersrand, Cnr Jorissen and Bertha St, Johannesburg
Website: wits.ac.za/wam
Email: [email protected]
Facebook: @WitsArtMuseum
Instagram: @witsartmuseum_wam
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