No Man’s Art Gallery is delighted to present Intsomi, the third solo exhibition by Buhlebezwe Siwani with the gallery. The festive opening will take place in coordination with the Festive Gallery Night of the Amsterdam Art Week 2025, on Thursday 22 May at 17:00. Intsomi will be running over both gallery spaces, including NMAG de bar (Bos en Lommerweg 88) and NMAG KIOSK (Willem de Zwijgerlaan 327) in Amsterdam.
Intsomi is a continuation of Siwani’s research into the reclaiming of places and spaces in the Netherlands, aiming to reveal the ways in which the Netherlands holds strong ties to colonial practices. In Xhosa, ‘intsomi’ means “story”; a word that echoes the narratives shaped by and born from these histories. An ode to rituals of resistance, Intsomi will arrive as a multi-dimensional installative exhibition, where past and present converge in a testament to memory, reclamation, and transformation.
Buhlebezwe Siwani (b.1987, SA) is a visual artist that lives and works between Cape Town and Amsterdam. She completed her BAFA at the Wits School of Arts in Johannesburg in 2011 and her MFA at the Michealis School of Fine Arts in 2015. Siwani works with performance, photography, sculpture and installation. Siwani’s work interrogates the patriarchal framing of the black female body and black female experience within the South African context. As an initiated Sangoma, a spiritual healer that works within the space of the death and the living, Siwani focused her artistic practice into rituality and the relationship between Christianity and African spirituality.
Central to her work is her own body, which operates in multiple registers as subject, object, form, medium, material, language and site. Her work can be described, although not literally, as the documentation of a diverse set of performances, which are rendered through video, photography, sculpture, installation and works on paper. Each of her projects deals with the relationship between ancestral rituals and modern life, touching social and political topics, such as the female body, black communities, histories of colonization and the paradoxes of our contemporary society, all seen through the filter of the artist’s own biography and experience.
Intsomi will be running over both gallery locations: Willem de Zwijgerlaan 327 and Bos en Lommerweg 88 until 6th July 2025.
