Artist-to-Artist:

Unathi

Mkonto

Nominated

by

Yinka

Shonibare

CBE

RA

This solo presentation introduces a new body of sculptural work by Unathi Mkonto, in which architecture is reimagined as a living, mutable condition rather than a fixed structure. Developed through abstraction, the works extend Mkonto’s ongoing enquiry into still life and portraiture as spatial propositions, here resolved into a series of inhabitable forms. Drawing on processes of cultivation, growth and cyclical regeneration, the sculptures propose “any life could be architecture,” positioning organic systems as models for building. Rooted in a South African context shaped by apartheid spatial legacies, this body of work seeks to humanise and destabilise inherited structures through a language of adaptability and possibility.