Kitso Lynn Lelliott
Kitso Lynn Lelliott’s practice moves between video installation, film and writing. She is preoccupied with enunciations from spaces beyond epistemic power and the crisis such epistemically disobedient articulations cause to hegemony. Her work interrogates the ‘real’ as it is shaped through contesting epistemologies, traversing cosmological and ontological thresholds towards unsettling the narratives and idea forms that took over the Atlantic during the formative episode that shaped the modern age. Her work is an enactment of enunciating from elision and between historically subjugated subjectivities, privileging South-South relations that are in relation to yet imaginatively and epistemologically unmediated by the Global North. In 2017 she was laureate of the Iwalewahaus art award and was a featured guest artist at The Flaherty Seminar. In 2019 Lelliott won the NIHSS award for best visual arts. She was a postdoctoral fellow and artist in residence with the Centre for Humanities Research at the UWC and artists in residence with the Cité internationale des arts in Paris in 2019. She was with the CHR until 2022 when she took up a senior lectureship with the University of the Witwatersrand. Lelliott was the winner of the 2024 Henrike Grohs Art Prize, and was awarded the Brooklyn based International Studio and Curatorial Program’s Tauck Ritzau Innovative Philanthropy award for a residency in New York in 2025. In 2026 Lelliott is an artist in residence experimenting with alchemy with the Artist Residency Schloss Balmoral.
