At Decorex, AI gets a body

There’s a creature coming to Decorex Africa this year. It doesn’t have a name but it is something between a monster and a soft thing. Its form came from a phone screen late at night, from a mother working between family demands and whatever time she could steal for herself. The AI image was generated in Midjourney, guided by a colour palette from a show curator who fell in love with its strangeness.

Now craftspeople who build monumental works for AfrikaBurn have translated it into a physical sculpture at the centre of this year’s 100% Design Africa installation at Decorex. People will walk around it, touch it. They won’t necessarily know it was created through an algorithm, shaped by the dreams and artistic sensibility of a human.

When softness becomes a question

The theme for Decorex 2026 is ‘The Soft Life’. Creative directors Garreth van Niekerk and Alan Hayward say the decision was instinctive; the phrase seemed to name something already in the air — either an idea so obvious it risks saying nothing, or so precisely calibrated to the moment that it functions like a mirror.

“It’s a dismissal of hustle culture,” says Van Niekerk. “The concept of work-to-die is rejected along with the things many people in our generation were told by our parents: that you have to work hard to secure the four-bedroom house, to get your kids into the right school.”

But Hayward resists the easy version — beige walls and linen throws. “The soft life isn’t beige on beige. It’s about things that are comfortable, homely, and that have heritage.” It’s softness that reaches into community, sustainability, the labour behind what we choose to live with. Without that extension, the soft life risks being reduced to mere comfort for those who can afford it.

People think there’s no creativity in AI art, but it’s precisely my past experiences and artistic soul that bring the works to life.” — Arminda da Silva

The unexpected figure at the centre

Into this softness, Decorex has placed an AI artist.

Arminda da Silva works under the name ImagineThat. I first encountered the artist last year at the Roger Ballen Centre for Photography in an exhibition about wrestling with AI, authorship, and the unconscious. Her pieces weren’t easy. Fleshy, distorted, humorous in the way that makes you uncertain whether to laugh — but they touched something I couldn’t easily name.

“People think there’s no creativity in AI art,” she says, “but it’s precisely my past experiences and artistic soul that bring the works to life.” I remember feeling the presence of a specific sensibility when I saw her works — a human vision carefully shaped through a tool.

Her appointment as Decorex’s featured artist — a title that ordinarily goes to ceramicists, weavers, furniture designers — is either provocation or recognition.

Van Niekerk traces a line from the physical logic of her images to The Soft Life’s central proposition: that spaces should accommodate human bodies more generously. This is where Da Silva’s work gathers its force. Her distorted, bodily figures aren’t strange decorations; they’re statements about comfort, form and the shapes we come in.

I hadn’t expected her means of making. She began on her phone using Decorex’s phrases, colour palette and images of draping, mixing and remixing the input until the creature began to show itself. It happened on the couch or lying in bed at night. “That’s where the love of AI art came from, the fact that I could do it anywhere,” she says. “It allowed me to be creative at a time in my life when I didn’t have the freedom to sit and paint.” ‘Making’ freed from the studio, schedule and inherited seriousness of how art is supposed to be produced.

She found a creature somewhere between soft and strange — Van Niekerk knew it immediately.

What critics miss

Scrutiny of AI is necessary. I’m concerned that the strongest objections come from those least familiar with its actual use. When the technology enters the field of art, that distance can harden into reflexive dismissal. Da Silva has encountered that kind of response, but she’s less interested in defending the tool than in returning to the private force of making. “I do this for myself,” she says. “It brings me joy.”

The serious version of that concern, that AI can launder others’ labour into the hands of whoever writes the prompt, deserves a serious answer. Critics of the 2026 Whitney Biennial, currently running in New York, raised a version of it recently, arguing that some works in the show mirror earlier practices without knowing it. Resemblance in place of relationship, pattern where lineage should be. The concern is legitimate, but wrong when applied to Da Silva.

She spent years as a graphic designer and illustrator, accumulating a sensibility around the uncanny, the bodily and the strange. Her images carry her experienced eye. This and her artistic soul bring the work to life. In her view, authorship functions through taste, accumulation, and the long work of becoming someone with something to say. The algorithm is the instrument. The sensibility is hers.

Decorex does something more interesting still. Da Silva’s images begin in data and arrive as fabric; start on a phone — and become sculpture. AI isn’t replacing craft; it gives craft a new set of problems to solve.

Soft, but not simple

South Africa isn’t a soft place. The gap between the life aspirationally curated and the life practically navigated can stretch as wide as the Highveld sky. The Soft Life, as a cultural trend, emerged from this tension — from the exhaustion of people promised that striving would deliver.

Da Silva’s work belongs to the more honest version of this conversation. It’s not pretty. It plays with discomfort, bodily distortion, the unfamiliar. Suggesting that softness isn’t the absence of difficulty but a quality of attention, of refusing the harshness that comes from things made without care for how they land on actual human beings.

She created the Decorex creature on a couch, late at night. At some point, a visitor to the show who knows none of the backstory will stand in front of the sculpture and feel something they can’t name. That’s what design does at its best — it doesn’t explain the world, it holds it differently.

Decorex Africa 2026:

• CTICC, Cape Town, June 25–28.
• Sandton Convention Centre, Johannesburg, July 30–August 2.