ICTAF 2025

Abdus Salaam

Abdus Salaam (b. 1989) is a visual artist who lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.

Salaam is a self-taught multi-disciplinary artist inspired by natural beauty, ecology and spirituality. Salaam reveals a sensitivity to three- dimensional spatial expression and the metaphysical connotations inherent in nature, materials, forms and colours. Contemporary in his mystic abstraction, his work is rooted in poetry, calling from a familiar place to a state of peaceful and intensive longing, using materials to explore the immaterial and always working alone to imbue his intention into his work. Moving freely between mediums – from sculpture to painting, video, photographic ‘light paintings’, poetry, augmented reality, and music – he creates poetic worlds, from the intimate to large-scale installation.

His work is a cultural fusion of Western, Eastern and African sensibilities, shaped by his international coming of age and rooted in the dramatic landscapes around Cape Town, where his earliest memories were shaped on a farm, spending time painting and sculpting with natural materials in the mountains of South Africa with his mother.

Salaam is represented in collections locally and abroad, including the Mohammed Afkhami and Robert and Renée Drake Collections. He held two sold out solo presentations in 2022, both at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair and Abu Dhabi Art In 2023 Salaam was !nalist in the Art Figura Prize, culminating in an exhibition in Perla Castrum Museum in Schwartzenberg Castle, Germany. In 2023 he was selected as the artist in residence for the prestigious Institute of Public Architecture’s Blockhouse Residency on Governor’s Island, New York. In November 2023 he presented a second sold out presentation at Abu Dhabi Art.

In 2024 he completed a residency at the prestigious Nirox Foundation, followed by a critically acclaimed exhibition. He is currently on residency at the Giorgio Angeli Residency in Pietrasanta, Italy.

Mille Kalsmose

Mille Kalsmose (b.1972, Horsens, Denmark) is a visual artist who lives and works in Copenhagen and New York.

Kalsmose’s multifaceted practice spans sculpture, installation and two dimensional works, offering what can be described as ‘spiritual survival kits’—artworks that explore and reimagine human existence and interconnectedness. Central to her work are themes of family constellations and the intricate relationships between individuals and the world around them.

Kalsmose’s work materialises what is invisible to the eye – a constant driving force and an indispensable desire throughout her practice. Combining autobiography with neuroscience, personal experiences with social enquiry, Mille Kalsmose creates artworks that resonate on a multitude of levels. She has worked with a wide range of materials and explores the architecture of memory, identity, psychological mechanisms, and spiritual life conceptions, creating a union of the unconfined in highly tactile manifestations.

Kalsmose holds an MA from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and has studied at the Bio Art Lab at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, MAVI (Museum of Visual Arts) in Santiago, Chile, the United Nations Headquarters in New York, CCA (Center for Contemporary Art) in Andratx, Spain, La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona, ITAMI Museum in Hyōgo, Japan, Fundacion Valentín de Madariaga in Andalusia, Spain, Horsens Art Museum, Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Kastrupgaard Collection, and Gether Contemporary. Her works are included in numerous private and public collections worldwide.

THK Gallery will present for the first time in Cape Town Kalsmose’s celebrated ‘Collected Memory’ project, which debuted at the UN Headquarters in New York in 2020, and has been since traveled to museums and cultural destinations worldwide. At each location, the installation gathers new contributions, continually expanding its archive of human experiences.

‘Collected Memory’ has garnered many accolades, and in 2025 was named a finalist for The Heitland Foundation Prize.

Talut Kareem

Talut Kareem (b. 1994) is a contemporary artist based in Lagos, Nigeria. He received his National Diploma in Mass Communication at Moshood Abiola Polytechnic, and subsequently pursued a B.A. in Visual Art from the University of Lagos. His practice is rooted in drawing and painting, with painting being his primary form of expression.

Kareem creates richly detailed portraits by combining realistically rendered charcoal figures overlaid with bright colours and abstract patterns. By juxtaposing the monochrome of the charcoal with the colourful spherical shapes in the picture plane, he has developed a unique visual language, allowing him the freedom to explore figure composition, and further develop his narrative.

His practice centres around the transitory nature of our awareness, depicting the individual’s emotional and mental states – as well as larger patterns of social behaviour – while attempting to capture his own state of mind.

Kareem has been featured in exhibitions including Next of Kin where he was awarded a third winner prize, Conversations, Sublime, and his most recent group exhibition, Unusual Suspects at AAF. He also featured in the group exhibition Stop, listen! at CFHILL Gallery in Stockholm, Sweden, which explored Nigeria's contemporary figuration movement. In November 2021 Kareem was selected for Self-Addressed, organised by Kehinde Wiley and Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles. For this landmark exhibition, Wiley invited a selection of contemporary African artists to produce a self- portrait. Together these portraits presented a new exploration of identity, perception, and self-regard within the global stage.

He has participated in artist residencies including the Rele Arts Foundation Young Contemporaries, 3 x 3 x 3 Artists in Residence, and the AAF Artist in Residence Program at the African Artists' Foundation in Lagos, Nigeria.

Kareem speaks of his practice: "After completing my education, I started working in the studio and drew inspiration from the people around me. Before starting to paint, I was drawing in black and white. I felt the need to put my feelings on paper, and I used drawing as a therapy to combat depression. The use of colour came out of the need to experiment. From this experiment came the spherical shapes. When I felt disconnected, I blurred out the faces of the subjects in my drawings. The technique I use depends on the mood I am in. The work is very personal, and I use it to reflect my own reality. "

Duncan Wylie

Duncan Wylie (b. 1975, Harare, Zimbabwe) is master painter, internationally renowned for his layered expressionist brushwork and deep understanding of the medium.

His complex narrative paintings have been exhibited at institutions including the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the Palais de Tokyo, the Museum of Grenoble, the Modern Gallery Saarbrücken, the Pinacothèque in Luxembourg, the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, and the Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town. His works appear notably in the collections of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, Le CNAP, FMAC, FNAC, MUDAM Luxembourg, the Museum of Grenoble, and in the Pritzker, Guerlain, Colas, Perrier Jouët, et Claudine et Jean Marc Salomon foundations.

He was surrounded by art and culture from an early age, inspired by his mother, a curator at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. This lead to his training in drawing and painting with the artist Helen Lieros, which in 1992 resulted in him receiving the National Schools of Zimbabwe Prize at the age of seventeen.

Fascinated by painting, and particularly French artists and artists that had lived in France — Manet, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Picasso — he settled there in 1994, in order to pursue his dream of studying at the prestigious École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, with it's history spanning 350 years. After he passed the rigorous admission procedure, worked in the ateliers of Jean-Michel Alberola and Pierre Buraglio, graduating with distinction in 1999.

"In his works, Duncan Wylie plays contrasts and oppositions. He oscillates between construction and deconstruction, abstraction and figuration, order and chaos or again between empty and full in order to show that behind a first figured world, a second awakens." Zoé Isle de Beauchaine for the Art Newspaper March 2023

Duncan Wylie acquired French nationality in 2005 and lives between London and Paris.

Natnael Ashebir

Natnael Ashebir (b. 1995, Ethiopia) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, drawing, and photography. His work critically engages with themes of history, identity, memory, and belonging, examining how individual and collective experiences inform the construction of self and place. Through his nuanced exploration of these intersections, Natnael crafts compelling visual narratives that bridge personal reflection and broader sociocultural inquiry.

He holds a BFA from the Alle School of Fine Art and Design (2021), a diploma from Entoto Polytechnic College (2016), and a certificate from Abyssinia Fine Art School (2013). In 2022, he received second prize at the Emerging Painting Invitational (EPI) Prize. Based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Natnael continues to expand his multidisciplinary practice, fostering a dialogue between tradition and contemporary expression.

Leila Abrahams

Leila Abrahams is an interdisciplinary artist from Cape Town, South Africa. Her practice weaves together aspects of her personal histories drawing from her experiences with grief, mental health and chronic illness. Her decade-long journey with the condition of Systemic Lupus Erythematosus is foundational to her artistic inquiries. Using materials ubiquitous within the medical practice; gel capsules and blister packs, Abrahams gestures at a new vocabulary to approach difficult conversations around invisible ailments. At the heart of her deeply intimate and embodied practice, is a yearning to find ways to navigate her own illness while also creating space for less stigma and more compassion. Through an abstract and minimalist language emphasised by the careful placement of materials, Abrahams creates beauty, harmony and order —which in turn become subtle acts of resistance. She reflects; “My work speaks to the overwhelming nature of chronic medication and the waves of emotion that accompany the experience. I came to accept my medication as something I take daily but that no longer has power over me.”

Abrahams obtained a BA(FA) from the Michaelis School of Fine Art (University of Cape Town) in 2021. In 2022, she participated in the group exhibition; Within the Fold at Smac Gallery in Johannesburg. Abrahams is the inaugural artist in residence with The Ramp Residency in Cape Town (2022).

Gillian Rosselli

Gillian Rosselli (b. 1962) is a visual artist living and working between Harare and Vienna.

Roselli’s painting practice — encompassing both figuration and abstraction — reflects on a range of contemporary questions and socio-political issues. Her latest body of work, 'After the Rain’, considers the profound, and life-giving significance of rain, and translates Rosselli’s elemental sensations and experiences during the first rains of the season in Zimbabwe into to vivid, impulse-lead compositions. Rosselli obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Michaelis School of Fine Arts in Cape Town in 1984 and has since developed her complex, distinctive language.

Rosselli’s work navigates both personal and societal issues. Beyond her socio-political focus, she uses her unique visual language as a tool to connect her work to the global contemporary discourse, and the key themes of identity, queerness, collective narratives and memory. Deeply committed to vision and spiritual connection, she imbues her paintings with layered acrylic textures, a sensitive approach to colour, and ambiguous contours.

She has held six solo exhibitions, and her work is featured in public and private collections worldwide, including the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Royal Embassy of the Netherlands (Harare), Cottoc Zimbabwe, Anglo American and Mobil Oil.

In 2024 Rosselli represented Zimbabwe at the Venice Biennale. Other notable exhibitions include ‘Five Bhobh - Painting At the End of an Era’ at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town in 2018. She has won many awards throughout her career, including the overall award of distinction for painting in Zimbabwe in 1995.

Abdus Salaam

Duncan Wylie

Thomas Wachholz

Natnael Ashebir

Gillian Rosselli

Leila Abrahams

Mille Kalsmose

Abdus Salaam

Mille Kalsmose

Talut Kareem

Duncan Wylie

Natnael Ashebir

Leila Abrahams

Gillian Rosselli

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