Art Basel Miami Beach | Kabinett Sector: Charlene Komuntale

For the Kabinett solo presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach 2026, Charlene Komuntale brings together a focused body of works under her ongoing series Threads.

The series represents the artist's ongoing inquiry into how ideas of beauty, value and visibility are constructed, inherited and internalised. What begins with the female body gradually expands into questions of imagination, knowledge, history, law and authority.

Komuntale examines beauty as a tool of power and a form of currency that can determine who is made visible, who receives attention and who is considered valuable. She is interested in the systems that produce these judgements and the ways they shape how people are seen and understood. The corset is a central site of inquiry because it holds a complex history of women's bodies. It has been used to discipline and reshape the body according to ideals of femininity, while also enabling women to occupy visual space and participate in constructing their own appearance. Komuntale is drawn to this complexity. Across the corset works, unravelling and deconstruction become ways of examining how inherited ideas about beauty, femininity and value shape the body and imagination.

Across these works, Threads examines the structures that quietly teach us what is beautiful, valuable, knowable and authoritative. Komuntale allows these tensions to remain open, creating spaces for interrogation, curiosity and reflection.

In The Ordered Possession, for instance, an antique brass tap and a colonial-era geography book examine the relationship between exploration, knowledge and territorial control. The Shaping of a Savage turns to colonial literature to consider how narratives shape perceptions of cultural identity and difference. Elsewhere, works such as Thy Source and Thy Reservoir use the corset, measuring tape and flowing beads to explore the expectations placed on women's bodies and the ways their worth becomes tied to beauty, nourishment and provision. The barrister wigs in works like Precedence and The Paradox of Intentions extend these questions into legal authority, interrogating the relationship between institutional legitimacy and justice.