Tanatsei Gambura is a new-genres artist and cultural practitioner engaged in translocal research and fieldwork-based activities. She is the recipient of the 2022 Scottish Contemporary Art Network Spark Seed Fund and was a commissioned resident at Art Walk Porty, Edinburgh’s annual seaside festival. In 2019, she received the Diana Award for her work, The 25 May Movement (2016-2020), a social practice collective exploring culture and community as a primary arena for decolonial interventions. Tanatsei’s work has enjoyed an international audience with exhibitions in Berlin, Ghana, Amsterdam, and Los Angeles.

In the studio, Tanatsei is intrigued by the collusion between different ideas, materials, and forms. Drawing from lived experience, she contemplates issues of land, place, and contemporary culture. Tanatsei considers the processes of forgetting and remembering as productive spaces in which violence and trauma can be understood. She works primarily across installation, moving image, sound, text, and social practice. In both artistic and curatorial capacities, her engagements foreground collaboration and exchange.

Tanatsei is the author of Things I Have Forgotten Before, the Poetry Book Society’s autumn choice of 2021. In 2020, she was announced as the runner-up to the inaugural Amsterdam Open Book Prize presented by Versal Journal (Amsterdam) and was longlisted by the Rebecca Swift Foundation for the Women Poets’ Prize. Tanatsei’s poems have appeared in Poetry London, Prufrock Magazine, and New Coin Poetry Journal, among others. She is an alumnus of the British Council residency, These Images are Stories and is an inaugural fellow of the Obsidian Foundation.