BLACK SUBJECTS, Nitegeka’s 2012 film, was first exhibited as part of his second solo show, Black Cargo (2013). This work, created in a studio environment, features actors performing the artist’s sculptures with their interactions based on the improvised negotiations of survival. By combining performance and sculpture to visually articulate forced migration and other existential obstacles to movement, BLACK SUBJECTS highlights the inextricability of relationship between figure and obstacle, between movement and stasis. Nitegeka says: “Cargo, functioning both as the black subject and his carried load, portrays the residual physical and emotional burden of experiencing social trauma, particularly as associated with refugees and asylum-seekers. The show offers ways of seeing the black subject's complicated and fluid  mechanics of negotiating survival in intermediary shifting spaces to which he constantly has to adjust.”

Rwandan-born Serge Nitegeka lives and works in Johannesburg. He has had eight solo exhibitions at Stevenson, Johannesburg and Cape Town (2012-2022), and shown at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, SCAD Museum of Art, Georgia, and Le Manège Dakar.

Group exhibitions include ‘Labor&Materials’ 21c Museums, Kansas City, ‘Ubuntu’ at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, ‘Mapping Worlds’ at Norval Foundation, and ‘What Remains is Tomorrow’ at South African Pavilion, 56th Venice Biennale.

He received the 2019 Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation Grant-Award, the 2018 Villa Extraordinary Award for Sculpture, and the 2010 Tollman Award for Visual Arts.