Thania Petersen works across disciplines to conjure connected histories and collective futures across the Global South, anchored in her perspective as a South African of Afro-Asian creole descent. Her work is an invitation to engage with stories of resistance and creativity in the face of oppression. Figures perform alternative narratives of the past in situ, digitally transposed onto a colonial artistic rendering of place or posing in contemporary sites of historical significance. In these representations, Petersen situates local stories, rooted in the context of Cape Town, within their broader historical geographies, most prominently the Indian Ocean world.
In the Biennale Arte 2026, Petersen draws on her recent project JAWAP – which traces the migration of Sufi music as a living archive – and applies its theme to the medium of textiles. Her large-scale Cosmological Offerings for a Drowning World and smaller Cosmological Acts of Devotion – ACT 1 are crafted out of embroidery and appliqué and embellished with beads. Ornate tombs and fenced graves of Muslim saints, known as kramats, dot an iconic seventeenth-century Southern African landscape; levitating historical vessels recall mobility across oceans and time. A ribbon of contemporary Sufi practitioners in prayer traverses the terrestrial and celestial realms, connecting the rootedness of Cape Islam to distant places and alternate timelines.
—Saarah Jappie
