Absolutely gorgeous. Her paintings bring joy to the heart. Buqaqawuli Thamani Nobakada art is a reality manifesting the truth of how our world should look like and her paintings definitely are shaping a beautiful world. There is joy in her paintings, presence of the divine, beauty of the soul of the planet rejoicing and thriving as we should be. Thank you for this beautiful manifestation Buqaqawuli.
About Statement
Our Dreams Began to Chase Us Back, first solo presentation in France by South African artist Buqaqawuli Thamani Nobakada, opening as part of MaSH in Paris during Art Basel Paris 2026. Curated by Destinee Ross-Sutton, presented in partnership with Pierre Cornette de Saint Cyr.
Press Release
Coinciding with Art Basel Paris 2026, South African artist Buqaqawuli Thamani Nobakada (b. 2000) makes her Paris debut and first solo presentation in France with Our Dreams Began to Chase Us Back, a new body of work curated by Destinee Ross-Sutton and presented in partnership with Pierre Cornette de Saint Cyr.
Nobakada’s focuses her practice on the use of painting as a medium for manifestation. Instead of documenting the world as it exists, she gives material form to worlds not yet fully realized.
Desire becomes a generative force: abundance is painted into being before it exists in reality.
The exhibition’s title comes from a shift Nobakada has begun to recognize between the worlds she imagines, and the life unfolding around her. Having spent years creating her aspirations with increasing specificity, she has begun to witness her lived reality echo the worlds she first constructed on canvas. Painting becomes a means of showing the future what shape it might take. The dream, having been pursued and pictured so insistently, now starts to learn its maker’s desires and begins, in turn, to pursue her.
Black women recline beside swimming pools, listen to records, move through gardens, gather around lavish tables and preside over grand interiors, in six new artworks. These are both representations of luxury, and windows of possibility. Nobakada lovingly paints abundance as a space in which her subjects can imagine themselves safe, beautiful, desired, unhurried, and entirely at home.
There is an implicit politics to this act of adoration. Nobakada considers what it means to picture Black women experiencing beauty, pleasure and abundance without requiring an explanation for how they arrived there. Her protagonists need neither justify their pleasure nor make themselves legible through struggle. Nobakada uses beauty, tenderness and self-regard to assert her subjects’ agency over how they are seen, and how they imagine themselves, as a softer alternative to protest, one that emphasizes the need for centering one’s self in spite of a world that can often demand self abandonment.
Nobakada’s use of acrylic on hand-prepared lace is central to her practice. The material recalls the curtains in her maternal grandmother’s home, which the women of the family were responsible for caring for and repairing. In Nobakada’s hands, lace transforms into landscape, architecture, clothing and skin. The nature of the lace goes beyond ornamentation, and becomes one of the languages through which the intellectual meaning is created.
Nobakada’s Paris debut follows a period of growing institutional recognition. In 2025, she presented Her Ladyship, Countess of Cumakala at the Albany Museum of Art in Georgia, her first solo exhibition in the United States; two works by Nobakada are now held in the museum’s collection. In February 2026, the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town acquired her 2024 painting Olympia (1863) – Giving Herself Flowers: A Reverence for Self Adoration, Nobakada’s reinterpretation of Édouard Manet’s Olympia. The work is currently on view in the newly opened Matereality V2, an exhibition examining the ways contemporary African artists use material to engage broader questions of identity, beauty, gender and society.
Her institutional recognition has been accompanied by remarkable international momentum. Nobakada received the ANNA Audience Award in 2023. Her works presented at 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London sold out on opening day, followed by another sold-out presentation at EXPO Chicago. At Market Art Fair in Stockholm, her work was acquired within the first fifteen minutes of the VIP preview. Her New York solo debut opens November 16, 2026, in partnership with Frevo NYC and curated by Destinee Ross-Sutton.
Our Dreams Began to Chase Us Back returns to the source of Nobakada’s practice of imagining and manifesting something into existence. The paintings are creations of both image and instruction for a reality that one hopes to exist in. As worlds once painted into possibility increasingly begin to resemble the life unfolding around her, the dream acquires a momentum of its own.
“we are the ones we have been waiting for.”
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