Shandré Lummis-Rabie (b. 1998, Johannesburg, South Africa) is a multidisciplinary visual artist working across printmaking, cyanotype, installation, sculpture, textiles, and mixed media. Her practice is grounded in research, lived experience, and processes of collecting, documenting, and recontextualising materials, images, histories, and spaces.
Her work explores identity, belonging, memory, and the construction of historical narratives in South Africa, with a particular focus on Coloured identity, Khoisan histories and contemporary cultural reclamation. Drawing from personal and collective histories, she investigates the ways colonialism, apartheid, displacement, and racial classification continue to shape relationships to land, culture, language, ancestry, and belonging. Her practice is also concerned with who is represented within dominant histories, who is excluded from them, and who is given access to the spaces in which history is produced, preserved, and remembered.
Through research, documentation, and material experimentation, Lummis-Rabie engages with histories and spaces that have been overlooked, contested, restricted, or reframed through colonial and apartheid narratives. Her work considers the act of documenting as a form of reclamation, while questioning how contemporary visual culture can create space for histories and perspectives that have been marginalised. Moving between the personal and the political, she uses critical inquiry, personal narrative, and material engagement to revisit inherited narratives and explore alternative ways of understanding identity, history, and belonging.
