Tiffany & Co’s ‘Artist-to-Artist’ programme at Frieze London (see extra Frieze Week highlights) invitations established artists to pick up-and-coming creatives to current their work on the honest. This yr, Yinka Shonibare has nominated self-taught Cape City-based artist Unathi Mkonto. Spanning drawing, set up, sculpture and efficiency, his distinctive follow is pushed by a eager curiosity within the potentialities of structure, exploring, by sculpture, how you can create a greater lifestyle.
Unathi Mkonto, Cultivating soil, 2026
(Picture credit score: Unathi Mkonto)
Yinka Shonibare: Unathi Mkonto’s work caught my consideration as a result of he has such a singular method to minimalist artwork. Having lived in Cape City, he is actually keen on what is going on on in South Africa. His technique of presenting his work jogs my memory of a variety of minimalist approaches, however the distinction is that he does have an issue, which is South African, whereas the minimalists had been actually specializing in the article itself.
Unathi Mkonto: I studied structure, and that’s a part of my artwork now – in a more recent means and with my very own guidelines. I have been comfy being in between the 2, and by no means having to decide on a aspect. In my follow, the work is typically theatrical. I am within the surroundings that structure provides – what folks expertise within the area and what’s left behind. The voids and the in-between; all the things may be liveable inside my world in my structure. A cardboard field is usually a constructing, a drawing is usually a constructing, you may stay in something. I am exploring these theories and making an attempt to stretch a language of structure from the continent that can also be impressed by nature, water and the land, and so I am pulling from all these issues.
YS: I have been wanting on the work from London, pondering it is a distinctive method to art-making. Is it structure? Is it sculpture? I like that in regards to the work. It refers to art-making up to now, however in an African setting. That form of continuity of historical past pursuits me.
Yinka Shonibare, Nature Works (Diamond Mine Angola), 2025
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of the artist and Goodman Gallery. {Photograph} by Stephen White&Co)
‘I am making an attempt to stretch a language of structure from Africa that can also be impressed by nature, water and the land’
Unathi Mkonto
UM: I had been interested by how agriculture might develop into the way forward for African structure, as a result of we draw from the bottom and we be taught from the soil. We all know the way it works, and for me, it is an vital useful resource – fairly than bricks and glass and issues to construct, the bottom provides us a lot. I have been interested by what structure might come out of the soil, and I have been interested by timber. There may be additionally an aquatic really feel, with timber which are floating in water on the similar time. It is a mixture of the weather, a continuation of the ocean, and the seashore and the towers. What’s the historical data that Africa has about soil? And the way can Africans look extra into the soil to create a language – as a result of on the finish of the day, our languages are going to return from the soil, they’ll come from nature.
Unathi Mkonto, set up view of ‘If Joburg had a seashore who would go_’
(Picture credit score: {Photograph} by Anthea Pokroy)
YS: When folks see this work at Frieze, I believe they need to be broad-minded and nourished by new concepts.
UM: I am actually wanting ahead to creating a singular assertion, and encountering this fast-moving viewers. I used to be interested by a piece that may be a singular language that may talk, and in addition create a second to pause. One thing you may meditate on, one thing that is uncooked and fairly sincere, and that is not overly finished, however that pulls you for its honesty and its openness.
The Tiffany & Co ‘Artist-to-Artist’ programme is on present from 14-18 October at Frieze London, Regent’s Park
A model of this text seems within the November 2026 Artwork Difficulty of Wallpaper*, obtainable from 8 October in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple Information +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* as we speak
