Bronwyn Lace
Bronwyn Lace’s artistic practice draws on natural forms, from swarms of fishing flies to animal skeletons, bringing together visual art with physics, history, museology, and literature. Feast or Famine, 2026 demonstrates Lace’s characteristic repurposing or recycling of materials within immersive, site-responsive installations.
The film originated in time-lapse images taken in 2016 in the basement of Vienna’s Natural History Museum, which captured South African carrion beetles consuming the body of a European barn owl. The same species of bird once inhabited the old Corn Barn, shedding feathers and nesting materials, which Lace allowed to remain in the exhibition.
The songs of mourning that resonate through the barn give voice to death as a cycli- cal, life-giving force. A transgressive blend of whispers and shrieks mingles with tap dance, djembe, tambour, and cajon. What at first seems to be the Catholic requiem Dies Irae reveals a subversive rewriting: a Nguni phrase Uphi Jesu? (Where are you, Jesus?) replaces Pie Jesu, challenging singular interpretations of spirituality. Fusing African and Western traditions, this expressive soundscape straddles the sacred and profane.
Working between South Africa and Vienna, Lace moves between an introspective, process-led studio practice and more communal forms of artistic production. As Director of The Centre for the Less Good Idea, she joined the Centre’s Impresario Neo Muyanga and three South African artists for a creative residency at Valdemars Slot across 2026. Through intensive periods of research and rehearsal, Lace developed her installation in the Corn Barn, while also producing a new performance programme in collaboration with local partners.
Photo: Performances opening Season Two by The Centre for the Less Good Idea and Denmark-based collaborators, May 2026. © Davy Denke
“My communal practice involves co-founding, with William Kentridge, The Centre for the less Good Idea in Johannesburg in 2016. Today, I am its director and lead its international projects. The Centre is a physical and immaterial space to pursue incidental discoveries made in the process of producing work. We take our impulse from the Setswana proverb ‘E a re ngaka kgolo go retelelwa, go alafe ngakana/ If the good doctor can’t cure you, find the less good doctor’.”
— Bronwyn Lace
Photo: David Stjernholm
Artist Bio
Bronwyn Lace (b. 1980, Francistown, Botswana)
Bronwyn Lace co-founded The Centre for the Less Good Idea in 2016 with William Kentridge in Johannesburg, where she continues to serve as Director. Under The Centre Outside the Centre, she also works to establish relationships between the Centre and spaces across the globe. In 2020 the artist co-founded The ZoNE in Vienna, a collective exploring new approaches to inquiry and curation across disciplines.
Photo: Zivanai Matangi