︎
Anthea Buys

b, 1984 Johannesburg Based in South Africa

Anthea is an independent researcher, curator, and writer living in South Africa. She is interested in collective fabulation, unlikely place-making, constructive failure and improvisation. Her PhD research looked at New Babylon, the interdisciplinary life’s work of the Dutch artist and architect Constant Nieuwenhuys.

She has curated exhibitions for Tallinn Art Hall, Hordaland Art Centre in Bergen (where she was director, 2014-2017), WIELS Project Space in Brussels, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town, where her current undertaking is a retrospective exhibition of the South African, France-based performance artist Steven Cohen (forthcoming December 2025).


CV

EXHIBITIONS and makings


2025
Steven Cohen: Long Life
Iziko South African National Gallery. Opening December 2025.  

2020-2023
FORMS

2021
Hedwig Barry: Here is Where We Meet
Download catalogue

2017
Image Drain 
download the beautiful poster-catalogue

2014-2017
Hordaland Kunstsenter (Director)
Carl Johan Högberg: Shuttlecock, feat. Bob’s Your Uncle Sports Bar
James Webb: Xenagogue
Dineo Seshee Bopape: We need the memories if all our members
Toril Johannesen: Oppfinnelsen og avviklingen av øyet
The Land
After the Exhibition
OTHER lives

2013-2021
Want to read my whole PhD thesis?





Anthea Buys

A  selection of writing and related projects, in order of enjoyability. 

About 
CV

Hedwig Barry and the Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction

The first technological breakthrough of early humankind wasn’t a spear or a bludgeon; it was a vessel or a bag, something in which to hold what was foraged, to save it for later.

Latitudes.online, 2023



The New Fabric of Everyday Life

The destiny of blockchain art is the financialisation of artists themselves.

Kunstkritikk.no, 2020


We Asked for It

Netflix’s new art world horror film, Velvet Buzzsaw, capitalises on the real life horrors of the art world.

Kunstkritikk.no, 2019.

Artist imagines a world in which black excellence is not seen as an exception

(Popular media) Profile on Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi.

Sunday Times, 2020

Category Error

Essay on the work of David Koloane (originally published in Spanish).

Revista Fractal, 2018.






Shooting from the Hip, or, on Being Strategically Unstrategic

The art world needs to find – or indeed to make – more buffers, ones that don’t merely correlate with historical privilege.

Wherewithall, 2022


Scripted Engagement

The rush to make online substitutes for events derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic promises an influx of viewing technologies that approximate real life.

Kunstkritikk.no, 2020


‘Yes to who or what arrives’: Hospitality and Property in Contemporary Art

*Excerpt* from the forthcoming anthology  Hospitalities: Transitions and Transgressions, North and South.
Routledge, 2020. 



Codes, Weeds, Barriers

Essay in Andre Tehrani: Popular Disorder
Lord Jim Publishing, Oslo, 2014.


Eyeing Others

Essay in Mikhael Subotzky: Retinal Shift.
Steidl, 2012.  

Bopape Rattles Biennale Cage

(Popular media) Review of two commissions by Dineo Seshee Bopape at the 2018 Berlin Biennale,

Mail & Guardian, 2018.









The Land

(Curating)  James Benning, Amie Siegel, Bodil Furu, Michael MacGarry

Hordaland Kunstsenter, 2018.


Image Drain

(Curating) André Tehrani, James Webb, Carl Johan Högberg, Antonis Pittas, Andrew Amorim, Kristina Ollek, Laura Kuusk, Toril Johannessen, Mathijs van Geest, Mårten Spångberg, and Paul Kuimet.

Tallinn Art Hall, 2017

The Quiet Activism of everyday life

(Popular media) Review of Wolfgang Tillmans’ exhibition Fragile at the Johannesburg Art Gallery,

Mail & Guardian, 2018.

Make Bergen Great Again

Bergen’s plans for becoming an international cultural city overlooks the fact that the city already is.

Kunstkritikk.no, 2018.



The Professor of Desire

Review of Torbjørn Rødland, Fifth Honeymoon, Bergen Kunstall,

Kunstkritikk.no, 2018.

Painting in Flat Time

Essay in Carl Johan Högberg: Shuttlecock
Hordaland Kunstsenter, 2015.