Lemé Arends is a Johannesburg-based, LGBQTIA+
multidisciplinary artist and cultural practitioner whose work maps the persistent weight of colonial structures within the South African landscape. A graduate of the University of Johannesburg (BA in Visual Art), Arends investigates how systemic structures dictate the movement and “livingness” of
racialised bodies. Their practice specifically centers the choreography of survival within queer racialised
subjectivities, framing the queer body as a site of both historical erasure and radical endurance. Their practice is rooted in a sensory engagement with the environment. Often collecting pigments and found materials from their surroundings, Arends allows geography and infrastructure to inform the composition of each work. These layered, textured surfaces act as metaphors for the accumulation of personal and collective histories.
Following a 2025 residency at the 2Roads Foundation, Arends has deepened their application of Black Geographies and Queer Phenomenology to the archive, positioning the past as an active domestic presence. Through a distinctively queer lens, their work serves as an accounting of the voids in the official archive, pursuing “livingness” where there was once erasure. Through this approach, the work becomes a meditative intervention on land, memory, and the endurance of inherited narratives within racialised bodies in the landscape
