Art that will make you feel airborne and powerful

If you go down to the Market Photo Workshop in the next week you could find yourself standing or perhaps even gently bouncing on a low-slung platform in front of a painting of a gymnastic arena.

The flat effect of the paint in the saturated athletic colours of the late ’80s feels like an invitation to step out onto that wide open space — the “floor” where the gymnasts tumble, twirl and make miraculous gravity-defying beauty.

You too can be airborne and powerful. The sounds in your ears playing through a set of headphones are a symphony of sawdust, the noise of human effort, the squeaks of equipment, the breath of extreme hard work, practice and play all directed at these momentary expressions of excellence playing out in real time and then forever in slow motion. The competition.

As you feel the propulsive elasticity under your feet you are co-opted into this miracle of athleticism. It is an immersive experience that resonates particularly in an Olympic year, in which gymnastics becomes a headline act in the panoply of sporting feats we humans have invented to celebrate our embodiment.

This is the stuff of Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi’s practice. It is the place where mind meets body and the attendant political, social and economic meanings we attach to “games” and those human bodies that perform them. 

In person, Thenji has something of the energy of her work — a wonderful clarity of being. She has the elegant simplicity of her work that belies the depth of her ideas and processes fermenting below the unruffled surface.

A before-and-after sequence on Instagram showing the evolution of one of her paintings is telling. In the before, all the faces and bodies of the depicted crowd are articulated in detail. In the after, they have been reduced to their essence. Ideal forms gesturing to the ideas that inform a lot of her work — the individual and the collective.

It is a very seductive outcome and her work has been met with universal acclaim, from the Standard Bank Gallery, the ifa Gallery in Berlin, the South London Gallery, the Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rio de Janeiro and the Fondation Louis Vuitton. She has won the 15th Tollman award and works with a collective called MADEYOULOOK with Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho, and has collaborated with Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum on projects to foster community in the art world, when she is not showing solo at the Stevenson Gallery.

But the thing that is animating her right now is the decision to pursue a PhD. 

She is telling me about it over tea and cake at Avenue 2A in Hyde Park Corner. I ventured past the ceramic cones and braved the dashing clipboard-bearing doormen to see the beautiful new concept store last week and discovered — in this order — some ridiculously glorious clothes (for very flush Joburgers), a shoe section to build a dream on and a secret coffee enclave that is quite unexpectedly delightful.

You know, these children who come in are bright or whatever, but what a lot of people left that university with was a Rolodex (nobody knows what that is today), with all the connections

The views of Joburg’s blooming forest of jacarandas and the most outrageously sinful cake masquerading as a classic marble but with an outrageous twist convinced me this would be a lovely spot to chat in peace with Thenjiwe. And so it was.

She was born in New York to a South African father in exile and a Greek American mother who moved back to South Africa when Thenjiwe was nine.

“It’s sort of been my lifelong struggle coming from these parents who did very specific things. Maybe we didn’t see the direct result of them, but they were involved with creating change in a way that was very much more direct and much more connected to the centres of power. And so for me it is about everyday resistance, contributing to your local politics, even just in your neighbourhood or in your building, fighting for the workers who reside next to you in your apartment building, rather than outsourcing or treating people like second-class citizens, which still happens in most buildings in the northern suburbs. Those are actions I feel I can do. But maybe it is also in relation to having gone to a university like Harvard.”

She returned to the US to attend Harvard and laughs that it was not exactly a place focused on the visual arts. Mark Zuckerberg was in the year below her, which certainly puts a spin on things.

“You know, these children who come in are bright or whatever, but what a lot of people left that university with was a Rolodex (nobody knows what that is today), with all the connections.

“Certainly I had no idea entering that environment that that was the task. I did not get the memo that I needed to leave there having networked my arse off and created my pathway towards power in that way. So it’s a combination of, I guess, having been in the orbits of very powerful people and then like also just feeling my individual personhood and feeling the everydayness.” It is something she constantly returns to in her work. 

We talk about the art market, which strikes me as this huge global machine for extreme commercial gain. “This word ecosystem gets used a lot,” she says. “What doesn’t get talked about often is that the ecosystem doesn’t exist without oxygen, and the oxygen comes from the artists. Artists are at the centre of the ecosystem and it wouldn’t exist without us, but we are consistently made to feel as if we’re somehow disposable.

“I think musicians have the same experience; you're reminded that there’s always another one of you, but if there’s no market there will still be art. It can be a precarious position but this is what I want to do, regardless of what other people say about it, or if people like it or not. I just want to make things for people to connect with.”

I wonder what the decision to pursue a PhD is about. “I just had this feeling that I should attempt to think through writing too. I think the two will really be complementary and feed each other.”

• Catch Thenjiwe in conversation at the BMW ART Generation event at Nirox on November 2