In the mythology of artistic production, the studio has long been imagined as a fixed site, a room of solitude, discipline, and control. It promises containment, mastery, and continuity. Yet for many contemporary artists, particularly those working across Africa and its diasporas, the studio has become provisional, mobile, and relational. Increasingly, it is the residency, temporary, contingent, and often geographically and culturally dislocating, that shapes how art is made, thought, and lived. More than a pause from the demands of exhibition schedules or commercial pressures, the residency is a space to experiment, to test materials, to recalibrate perception, and to rethink the terms of a practice.
At Church Projects in Cape Town, Dada Khanyisa’s ongoing residency unfolds as an exercise in openness rather than resolution. By inviting audiences into her studio while works are still in flux, Khanyisa foregrounds the uncertainties, hesitations, and fragile beginnings that usually remain hidden. The open studio format transforms artistic labour into a visible process, emphasising dialogue between idea, material, and environment. Work in progress is not incomplete, but alive, and audiences are invited to witness the evolution of approach and concept. In this context, the residency functions as a space for exploration, where slowness, doubt, and iteration are essential parts of knowledge-making.
This attention to environment and process resonates with Misheck Masamvu’s nomadic practice. During his five-week residency at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg, Masamvu treated the city as both archive and interlocutor, allowing its textures, rhythms, and histories to shape his work. Yet Johannesburg was only one of many sites in which his practice circulates, including Mutare, Harare, Cape Town, and Europe. Rather than completing works in a single studio, he allows them to move through spaces, accumulating energies, gestures, and histories. Each site offers a different lens, a fresh perspective, and the residency becomes a way to sustain alertness, curiosity, and responsiveness within a practice that is inherently mobile.
Masamvu’s approach emphasises that residencies are not just spatial interventions, but temporal and conceptual ones. Entering a space as a temporary visitor recalibrates perception. The environment informs thought, and estrangement becomes productive. Residency is both a pause and a method, a way to allow ideas to emerge slowly and to interrogate familiar processes from new angles.
A related reorientation of practice is visible in Robin Rhode’s residency at NIROX Sculpture Park, culminating in Body as Sculpture at the Villa-Legodi Centre for Sculpture. Here, gesture, movement, and mark-making extend sculpture beyond the static object, positioning the body itself as material and measure. The residency’s environment, embedded within a landscape devoted to monumental form, allowed Rhode to explore scale, temporality, and ephemerality. The work asks questions about permanence, authorship, and the relations between action and object. In this context, residencies are not simply production sites but experimental fields, where artists can test conceptual boundaries and rethink disciplinary conventions.
Material discovery is central to Banele Khoza’s twelve-week residency at the Tracey Emin Foundation in Margate. Arriving with familiar materials, Khoza quickly exhausted them, prompting engagement with new surfaces, oil sticks, and painting mediums. This shift expanded the possibilities of his work, moving from paper to canvas and reopening dialogues with oil painting. In this way, the residency functions as a space for experimentation and risk-taking, allowing artists to explore unfamiliar processes under conditions of support. The tension between comfort and challenge is generative, creating openings for new modes of seeing, making, and thinking.
Across these examples, residencies reveal themselves as spaces of experimentation, reflection, and recalibration. They allow artists to suspend habitual approaches, to engage with unfamiliar contexts, and to expand their material and conceptual languages. In African and diasporic contexts, residencies also provide access to different networks, ideas, and perspectives, facilitating encounters that would not otherwise occur. They encourage attention, patience, and dialogue with place, medium, and process, privileging exploration over production.
Residencies offer alternative temporalities within an art world dominated by acceleration, visibility, and quantification. They provide intervals for incubation, iteration, and attentive engagement. Work is not judged solely by what is completed but by how thinking, risk, and curiosity are enacted. They allow artists to remain porous, responsive, and experimental, to interrogate assumptions and discover new ways of making.
In this sense, residencies are central to contemporary practice. They are not luxuries, but methodological spaces in which art develops in real time, where process is visible, material is reconsidered, and ideas take shape in dialogue with context. The residencies of Khanyisa, Masamvu, Rhode, and Khoza demonstrate how such spaces expand the possibilities of practice, allowing work to emerge in ways that are reflective, experimental, and generative. In these studios, across cities, landscapes, and continents, contemporary art is being quietly and insistently remade.