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12.07 - 16.08.2025
In actuarial science, risk collapses two temporal dimensions—the present and a time yet to come. “I will give value to this thing now, based on what its value will be in ten years.” Forecasting ignores the past (which belongs to accounting) and is only concerned with what might happen. It relies on mathematics, statistics, and probability to generate a decision, a prediction, where uncertainty becomes the source of risk. In this sense, time, uncertainty, and risk are fundamental to understanding value.
Vusumzi Nkomo’s ‘Games of Property’ operates within this logic. His critique of the ontology of the art object, and the gallery’s complicity in validating it, echoes the role of the actuarial. Here, the gallery becomes an insurance company, the audience its policyholders. Nkomo displaces value from the object itself, offering instead a prompt (a prediction), to which the audience responds with a gesture (a premium). This implicates them in the work as a whole (the policy). Over time, these accumulated gestures build value. Just as an individual’s insurance premium contributes to a collective risk pool, used to pay out others’ claims, Nkomo explores how value accrues communally, through structured participation. He investigates the relational economies between artist, audience, and institution (or insurer, policyholder, and actuary), positioning value as something that is negotiated across time and labour.
Vusumzi Nkomo, Movement #1 Lists & Values (Ongoing)
In Lists & values (Movement #1) (2025–ongoing), Nkomo documents interactions with gallery staff, logging their activities alongside the time spent and the value assigned to each task. The work reveals Nkomo’s interest in relationships and actions that exist beyond the static art object. These movements, small, administrative, and interpersonal, form part of an invisible infrastructure. Their mobility generates both value and meaning on a scale that Nkomo alone could not manufacture.
In his practice, the artwork’s social field mirrors the social field of the world. The field of the game acts similarly to the field of the political economy. In most games, a fundamental principle is symmetry. As you stand over the game, you assume a meta-position, where the game is available to you in its entirety. The problem of symmetry in the political economy, however, is that the world cannot be available to you in its entirety. The meta-position that affirms a point of stability is fictional. For example, there is the fiction that everyone has equal opportunity within the political economy. That asymmetry is the source of a fundamental anxiety, one I both recognise and experience in ‘Games of Property’.
My entry point to the exhibition is Anxiogenic Black Spots I-III (2025). It consists of three works, all of which use found cartographic paper. A grid is drawn in pencil upon them, with a black spot, made from black shoe polish and cash dye, smeared in each grid block.
The first bears the heading “Grondkaart vir die Afrikaanse Volkskunde Atlas” (Base Map for the Afrikaans Ethnographic Atlas), accompanied by a line drawing of the map of South Africa. Drawn in blue pen are triangles covering predominantly the northeastern quadrant; in red pen, circles appear across the central to northeastern interior. Nkomo’s use of a map from the Afrikaanse Volkekunde Atlas (AVA) describes Apartheid-era ethnographic atlases, which visually and statistically represented the population along racial, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural lines. The AVA, edited by A.J. Coetzee and published by the University of Witwatersrand (as indicated on the map), was rooted in Volkekunde—a uniquely South African form of anthropology aligned with Christian nationalist and apartheid ideologies.
The second work resembles something similar to an encyclopaedia, investigating the word ‘duwweltjie’, commonly known as ‘Devil’s thorn’ and scientifically known as ‘Tribulus terrestris’, alongside other Afrikaans words in relation to it.
Vusumzi Nkomo, Anxiogenic Black Spots III (2025)
Anxiogenic Black Spots #25 (2025) presents a similar gesture but under the heading “Oranje-Vrystaat”, referencing the former Boer republic under British suzerainty in South Africa during the second half of the 19th century, which ceased to exist after it was defeated and surrendered to the British Empire at the end of the Second Boer War in 1902. I recall my father reciting its motto: Geduld en Moed (Patience and Courage). My recognition of the Christian, Apartheid and Boer War affiliations, together with my familiarity with the words and their meanings, the surnames and the way the papers look like they could be torn from the biblical book collections my father owns, all feels incredibly close.
I consider what Nkomo reveals about the antagonisms structuring particular pieces within the game. The pleasure of playing lies in one’s ability to play the pieces in opposition to each other. This pleasure implies privilege; for one to experience it, another must be barred. According to Nkomo, for the artist to emerge as this privileged figure that signifies freedom, there must be an unfree. For an artist to be an Artist, someone else must not be. “In a world where everyone can do it, there are no Duchamps.” (Nkomo, 2024) Artists remain artists on the condition that no one else becomes one, because the value of the artwork depends on it. Nkomo shows me my implication—the violence that lies within my implication.
Vusumzi Nkomo, Games of Property (2025)
I think about an argument I had with a friend and his parents the day before I attended the opening. His mother insisted that the people of Orania have a cultural and legal right to their establishment, especially since, in her view, their presence harms no one. A bestaansreg, they argued. Beyond meaning “the right to exist,” bestaansreg describes the right to live with legitimacy within the world—often asserted when facing erasure or oppression. Considering Nkomo’s reflections on the violence produced through individuation, on what the meta-position affirms, and how people are implicated, I see that bestaansreg is afforded to those who can experience the pleasure and privilege of legitimised being. The harm inflicted lies within the very act of being afforded the right to exist. Their assertion of equilibrium is, ultimately, fictional.
Nkomo is not only using the game as a method of critique but as a way to understand it as an ideological marker—how capitalism seeks to reproduce itself ideologically as if it exists in a state of symmetry, equilibrium, or equality, when in fact, the moment we inhabit is one of dis-equilibrium.
He uses the ontology of the art object and the valorisation that the gallery’s epistemological framework provides as a launch point to open up questions and problems—about race, for example. It is my fear of the damage that my car could be subjected to that mobilises me to take out an insurance policy. This fear is the anxiogenic bearing. And it is this mobilisation of anxiety that I believe Nkomo seeks to articulate.
Vusumzi Nkomo, Games of Property (2025), Installation view at blank projects, Cape Town
