Aba Fynn

Alaina Khaleck

Alyssa Habana

My work inhabits a liminal space, a threshold between tenderness and discomfort, imitation and collapse. I am drawn to materials that both mimic and betray: melting wax that resembles skin in slow surrender, capsules that recall beehives or organs, and plaster that hardens yet crumbles. These forms whisper of transformation, deceit, and the quiet
violence of endurance.

Growing up within Coloured communities in post-apartheid South Africa, I came to
understand identity as a shifting performance, a choreography of accents, gestures, and emotions. This shapeshifting, born of necessity, echoes through my work as I explore how the body and home become sites of negotiation, both protective and oppressive. Domestic objects such as taps, sinks, and chairs appear as altered relics, hollow or overflowing, symbols of both care and control. They speak to neurodivergent rhythms and the rituals that hold us together when language fails.

I am drawn to binary oppositions: growth and withering, presence and absence, purity and
contamination. Within these tensions, my practice seeks the sacred within the broken and the beautiful within the decayed. Through texture, excess, and intimacy, I invite viewers into this liminal space, to look inward, to unlearn certainty, and to encounter what is raw, authentic, and uncontainable.

Alyssa Logan Habana is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice moves between the sacred and the material, rooted in the belief that creativity is a divine gift, a language for healing and revelation. Deeply influenced by her upbringing in post-apartheid South Africa, Habana’s work emerges from within Coloured communities where identity has long been
shaped by adaptation and survival.

Working across sculpture and installation, she explores binary oppositions such as beauty and decay, comfort and control, belonging and estrangement. Her tactile use of materials
including wax, plaster, capsules, and dentures transforms the ordinary into the uncanny, creating objects that seduce before they unsettle.

Habana’s practice honours multiplicity. It is an act of gratitude and defiance, a continual negotiation between what is visible and what is hidden, offering art as both sanctuary and mirror for collective healing.

Andani Khandela

Andani Khandela is a South African-born multidisciplinary artist born in that is based in Johannesburg, Braamfontein. Currently completing his bachelor’s degree in fine arts at the university of Witwatersrand, his work largely includes pencil drawings, digital posters/artworks, and video format performance arts. With his work distinguishable using the red pigment and striking imagery, Andani explores the pencil medium through the incorporation of other mediums like ink, paint, charcoal and using different surfaces like wood. With some of his concepts explored using video, Andani uses the medium as an exploration of human connections, emotions and concepts relating to the mundane existence. 

Using digital posters and collages Andani explores and grows on this topic. exploring concepts of the human experiences, largely inspired by his own life and lessons, he is inspired in creating imagery that explore concepts many can relate too. From identity to relationships and human interactions. Andani has created a visual language that investigates universal experiences through the lens of a South African, creating a perspective that is unique.

Aphelele Cele

Isiphetho

We form deep connections with others, hoping that these will last. Maybe not forever but that they last. When we begin to realize that these connections are in fact not forever we wallow in the anxiety and grief of it coming to an end. We anticipate the uncomfortable feelings, the disbelief that comes with being forced to let go. 

We try to mend things, try to mend the wounds and holes of the fabric of our friendships. Ngoba phela into edabukile uyayithunga uyilungise ize ibuyele esimweni.  Unfortunately, oftentimes our attempts at being a seamstress come a little too late or they are just in vain. And eventually we get tired of this struggle. Ngesinye iskhathi kungcono ukuyivala indaba. Kungcono ukuthi siyiphethe.

Aphelele Cele (b. 2003) is a South African visual artist currently completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. Born in Port Shepstone, KwaZulu-Natal, her early interest in art was nurtured during high school, where she first exhibited work as part of a group show at the Margate Art Museum.

Aphelele’s practice is grounded in painting but also extends to video and photography. Her work is a continuous process of self-interrogation, exploring themes of identity, memory, loss, and transformation. She draws from personal and collective experiences to unpack the psychological and emotional landscapes of being, often navigating grief, spirituality, and the complexities of becoming.

In a recent body of work, she investigates anticipatory grief, examining the emotional toll of loss before it happens—particularly in close relationships. Her visual language often employs layered imagery, fragmented figures, and the Samoiloff effect to portray these emotional landscapes.

Angel Dimba

Angel Dimba is a multidisciplinary artist whose current focus is on crochet as a tactile and meditative practice. Through crochet, they explore themes of comfort, memory, and reflection, often drawing from personal narratives and imagined worlds. Their practice is an ongoing gesture of connections of self and others through fibre. Creating immersive spaces, spaces for contemplation, exchange, and community. Their process is something slow, deliberate and meditative, often letting form emerge through repetition, a reflection on what it means to be in a relationship with oneself and others. 

In “Weaving into (Our)Selves~~~” they introduce the third space. They explore this third space using the form of a shrine. The shrine becomes a place where they can bring together things they usually keep hidden. What they’ve placed inside this shrine is what they consider their darkest truth(s), here they give it a space to exist, be seen and maybe even transform. The idea of a third space. A space that is encompassing of the something in between, the work aims to be less about revealing that truth literally, and more about how art can hold the weight of it, how the shrine creates a space where it’s both exposed and protected at the same time. They describe their process being something of an intense experience they never were ready for but the truths it exposed were so much more rewarding. Their work is heavily based around their psyche and mental health. They believe that declining mental health grants so many benefits to be had. It is a renewal, of self, of energy, they are on a different frequency, they are here, we are here. 

Athi koni u tshila hezwi zwithu zwi siho kha nne.

Ashay Parbhoo

Ashay Parbhoo is a complex soul.

Ashay [b. 2003] is a Multi-Disciplinary Artist who explores the themes of Soul Recurrence, Consumption and Interconnectedness in his work. The Johannesburg-based artist produces technically-heavy and conceptual works of art, creating a mesmerizing surreal journey which explores his experiences and thoughts through his use of an array of affective media.

Ashay world builds within his practice through fusing reality and dreamscapes with splashes of colour, sharp contrasts and intricate concepts. His work leaves a lasting impression on your senses, challenging what your preconceived perceptions of reality may be.

Ayanda Nkadimeng

Ayanda Nkadimeng (b. 2003) is a visual artist and researcher based in Johannesburg. Her practice is rooted in photography, memory, and the archive, centering personal and intergenerational narratives. Drawing on her upbringing in Limpopo, Nkadimeng’s work reflects on land, language, and familial memory, often through intimate portraits and quiet landscapes. Her ongoing series Lebaleng ka Gešo: GaNkadimeng explores the relationship between memory and place, using image-making as a means of preservation, reflection, and care.

Bongumusa Shezi

Bongumusa Shezi was born in Nkandla, KwaZulu-Natal, and is currently based in Johannesburg, where he lives, works, and continues his studies. He holds a B-Tech Degree in Fine Art from the Durban University of Technology, where his body of work was nominated for the prestigious 2018 Emma Smith Scholarship Award. Shezi’s multidisciplinary practice spans ceramics, sculpture, and installation, with a central focus on the fragility and transience of the human body.

He has worked with notable institutions such as the BAT Centre, artSPACE durban, and mrphome. Shezi has co-curated several exhibitions, including The Best of Isaac Sithole: Paying Tribute to the Artist, Asikhule Exhibition, and Transformation Exhibition at artSPACE durban. He also co-facilitated a visual art workshop hosted by the Durban Art Gallery. His work has been featured in prominent group exhibitions such as the ABSA L’Atelier Competition, Sage World Cup International Trade, and the National Premier Craft Award.

Busisiwe Mazibuko

This body of work is a quiet confrontation with the invisible.

It begins in shadow, those formless impressions that remain long after a wound, a word, or a silence. Each image becomes a frame in a larger choreography of remembrance, where the

body is both subject and site, archive and evidence. I use myself, my face, my gestures, my flesh, as a medium through which inherited and personal trauma finds form.

The portraits unfold through repetition, slight shifts in expression, posture, or angle, as if each gesture is reaching toward a truth that memory alone cannot recover. A veil falls. A shoulder turns. Eyes close, open, close again. These are not portraits in the conventional sense, but echo chambers, spaces where feeling resounds and where the self is not fixed, but fragmented and returning.

Black satin letters hover, cut, collapsed, sewn back together. When they refused to hold shape, I stitched them shut. The thread remains visible, a quiet record of insistence. These

stitched forms speak in a language beyond speech, a language of trauma, interruption, refusal. Floating and unfixed, they cast shadows that become part of the work, like memories that refuse to remain still.

They mimic the illegibility of memory when it has been repressed, rewritten, or whispered too many times. The shadows they cast, sometimes sharp, sometimes trembling, mirror the way trauma lingers, not just in the mind, but in the body, in breath, in the very air around us.

 

Busisiwe Mazibuko (b.2003) is a multidisciplinary artist, chronic overthinker, and full-time shapeshifter currently based in Johannesburg. Her work flirts with photography, performance, text, and the politics of self-representation.

Rooted in lived experience and guided by curiosity (plus a mild obsession with mirrors and herself), Busisiwe’s practice is shaped by trauma, gendered expectations, and the performance of identity. Think self-portraits, but make them existential. 

Through constructed self-portraits and carefully staged personas, she asks questions like: Who am I performing for? What happens if I stop? And is this lighting doing me any favours? It’s part confession, part resistance, part theatrical wardrobe change. 

When not making work, she’s probably hoarding visual references, rewriting captions, or wondering if ambiguity is a strength or just a really good hiding place. 

You’re invited to look, just don’t expect easy answers, or any answers at all.

Cameron Naidoo

Beginning from a body that drifts in ambiguous space, Cameron asks: what lies beyond medical case files? 

Chronic illness does not conform to conventional narrative structures that moves from diagnosis, to treatment, to cure. Instead, it lingers and recurs- often without resolution. 

Chronic illness is both never-ending, ever-changing. 

This defiance of temporal norms reflects a broader systemic issue within biomedical discourse. Scientific medicine relies on measurable data, structured time, and diagnostic categories to render bodies knowable. But what happens when an experience does not fit within these structures?

A diagnosis of an invisible illness has influenced her interdisciplinary art practice and guides her exploration of identity and body politics in the direction of medical humanities. Here, embodied knowledge is declared- a paradox of absence and presence that insists on bodily sovereignty and radical care. This corporeal alchemy traces the way the medical gaze can be met with a returned look.

“how do you reproduce the resistence between the body and its attempt to articulate? To allow the writing to remain uncomfortable performing the inarticularity of the body- it falters, stutters, spillages- is to attend to the body through language, is to attend to movement, the page changes texture, the words unable to remain still. Or, be broken, they lie flat on the page, unmoving” 

– Emmy Beber (2018).

Artist books and zines create alternative forms of illness narratives, blurring boundaries and opening ruptures. Scattered medical forms, documents and visuals stand as a metaphor of the human experience- revealing how the body encounters self-management, surveillance, and ongoing disruptions. An intense engagement in research is portrayed, as the process of making is inherently tied to the process of investigating, questioning, and reframing.

An intimate authority is evoked, allowing patients to look at how to recount a story that does not develop in a progressive way. The work does not serve as an allegory, the meaning is not found in what is said but through the process of witnessing. The reality of the experience is affirmed without trying to understand or grasp it.

Lived experience- its ache and endurance- commands authority. Witnessing becomes reclamation.

Chantell Sediba

Chantell Sediba is a multidisciplinary artist with a passion for pushing printmaking and substrate boundaries. With a fondness for unconventional substrates like wool, string and
hair. Sediba’s practice is a fascinating blend of experimentation and storytelling. When narratives do emerge, they’re often personal and woven with care , much like the materials
 themselves. Sediba’s work invites viewers to explore the emotional resonance of texture and form, with occasional surprises along the way. Think of it as art that’s tactile, thought-provoking and visually striking.

At the heart of Sediba’s practice is a curiosity about materiality and the ways in which textures can carry memory, identity and presence. By stepping away from conventional
surfaces such as paper or canvas, she embraces objects and fibres that already hold traces of the everyday. This allows her work to live somewhere between the intimate and the
experimental, where fragility meets resilience. The choice of substrates is never random: string may suggest continuity or connection, while hair evokes intimacy, memory and a sense of the body itself and most of the time, the gut feeling is a way of choosing materiality.

Through this material language, Sediba quietly challenges ideas of permanence in art, asking what happens when the delicate becomes central to storytelling.
Sediba’s approach also emphasizes process. Printmaking, for her, is not limited to the technical reproduction of images but becomes a space for invention…one where accidents,
textures and improvisations take on as much importance as intention. This openness gives her work a layered quality, encouraging audiences to look closely, to touch with their eyes and to consider the unseen labour embedded within each piece. Her evolving body of work positions her within a broader conversation about contemporary African art, particularly the role of women artists in redefining traditional practices. Sediba creates from a deeply personal perspective, yet her themes of materiality, the unconscious and transformation resonate universally. By balancing vulnerability with strength, her art fosters a dialogue about how stories can be carried in fibres and how one needs to tap deep into their unconscious to unravel these stories, how touch can become a form of narrative and how boundaries can be both respected and redefined.

Dickson Phiri

Dickson Phiri is a Malawian artist based in South Africa, working primarily in oil and acrylic paint. His practice explores the layered relationship between identity, memory, space, and politics, often drawing from personal and collective histories in Southern Africa. Phiri began painting at a young age through local nonprofit art initiatives, where early exposure to community-driven creativity shaped his commitment to storytelling through visual form. His work navigates questions of belonging and displacement, using expressive color and layered composition to reflect on how personal memory intersects with broader socio-political landscapes. Through painting, Phiri aims to make visible the unseen forces that shape identity, both inherited and self-determined. He continues to develop his voice as a painter in dialogue with the everyday lives and struggles of the people around him.

Farah Dindar

My practice begins in intuition. I enter the studio with fragments of a dream, a colour, a found object, a gesture I can’t forget, and follow where they lead. The work moves between painting, print, sculpture, and digital forms that are never fixed but always in a state of becoming. I am drawn to experimentation and vomiting compositional scenarios. I often think of the underground as both a literal and spiritual terrain. Beneath Johannesburg’s gold and dust are other circulations: money, memory, sound and faith. The desert, too, appears and reappears as a place of absence and devotion, of love stripped bare.

My imagery grows from what feels close: the ecology of animals and plants, the touch of textiles, psychedelic patterns. The works become part of a larger, speculative world. One I build through characters, stories, and symbols that slip between realism and fabulation. In this world, love and mysticism, the sacred and the earthly are all connected. My practice is a way of sensing connections and contradictions by making something momentarily visible, before it disappears again.

Farah Dindar was born in a world that made her float. Between the shifting surfaces of Johannesburg and being a Muslim girl in often non-Muslim environments, she became
curious, observant and intrigued with the unseen. Her work often arises from this sense of drift with an effort to locate herself within, and beyond, the landscapes that actively shape her.

Moving across paint, sculpture, print, animation, and digital illustration, Farah’s practice engages with speculative narrative as a way to make sense of her imaginations and the gravity within them. She is particularly known for her elongated, awkward characters that seem to be caught mid-morph. These beings operate like host bodies: physical extensions of the self that absorb and reflect the world around them. Drawn to ecology, mysticism, assemblage, social currents, her work ultimately builds worlds that are arcane and enchanting. For Farah, creating is intuitive and natural, where things don’t need to be named to be felt, where floating becomes its own form of knowing.

Gabriella Sithole

My work is about love, how two people come together with different ways of loving and have to figure out how to make it work. It’s about how it’s not always the adult versions of
us in the relationship, but the inner children who first learned what love feels like, or what it means to go without it.

In moments of closeness and conflict, those younger selves often reappear, trying to protect, to understand, or to heal something familiar. My art gives them space to speak.
Each piece becomes a conversation between the past and the present, between the parts of us that crave connection and the ones that fear it.
Through painting and poetry, I explore love as both a return and a reckoning — a place where healing requires patience, attention, and the courage to meet the child within ourselves and within each other.

 

Pretoria-born Poet | Love-Obsessed Romantic

Gabriella Sithole (b. 2002, Pretoria) is a poet who bleeds soft and thinks in rhyme. Her work is love; loud, aching, complicated love; captured in poems that flirt with heart and healing.A true romantic, she writes with the urgency of someone who knows that language is both a mirror and a balm. Blending raw, emotional poetry with watercolour and acrylic paintings, Gabriella lets words spill across the page like tears on canvas. Her recent work explores the many shades of love: familial, romantic, unspoken, unreturned; turning personal experience into something universal and beautifully bruised. Currently completing her Fine Arts degree at the University of the Witwatersrand, Gabriella is building a body of work that whispers, screams, and sings about what it means to love, to be loved, lose, and long; sometimes all at once.

Genevieve Tuson

Genevieve’s work this year has followed a central theme of hymnody, kinship, sexual violence, and the materiality of light and shadow. Her installations involve audio elements pulled from day to day life – edited, looped, and warped to converse with the physical elements of the work, which often involve string, yarn, thread, and hanging objects/artworks. Her final work for her last year of study looks structurally to Catholic litany prayers and canon style hymnody, tracing the path of the colour pink in her life from infancy to adulthood. Detailed drawings, prints, writing, and sculpture are visible through cutouts of a large loop of paper suspended from a wooden frame. A light shines through the cutouts and a speaker plays warped hymns softly from the centre of the ring. The language of the work is haphazard and child-like, clumsy stitching and packaging tape holding the structure together. The edges of the paper are trimmed in silver St. Benedict’s medals, and from the corners of the wooden frame objects hang – a bird’s nest covered in religious medallions, a rubber mouth guard, a dried pomegranate, a clump of bandages.
The work asks you to look closely, to listen carefully, and to hold what you see and hear with a gentle hand.

Genevieve Tuson is a mixed media, installation artist living and working in Johannesburg. She has just completed her 4th year of Fine Art at the University of the Witwatersrand, where her focus has been on textile work, light and sound installation, and religious iconography. Her research looks at queer memorial artworks in relation to the notion of the incorrupt body,
Liberationist theology, and relics, and her artistic practice is supported by her career as a
professional MMA fighter.

Itumeleng Mtshali

Itumeleng Mtshali is a visual artist from Thabazimbi and Polokwane, Limpopo, who resides in Johannesburg. Black identity, colourism, Christianity, and the continuous process of self-acceptance are all explored in Itumeleng’s work, which has its roots in personal memory, spirituality, and social critique. She explores how childhood, community, and surroundings influence a person’s sense of self through painting and mixed media. Her most recent work reclaims faith as a place of affirmation, healing, and belonging by reflecting on the beauty and tension inherent in the cohabitation of Christianity with Blackness. Emotional honesty, cultural reclamation, and narrative are the main themes of her work. Her goal is to produce art that not only captures her personal experience but also provides a space for others to view themselves clearly and compassionately.

Jemiye Ugwujide

Jemiye (Jemie) Ugwujide (b. 2003, Westminster, United Kingdom) is a Black, queer, African artist currently pursuing a BA Honours in Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. They work across multiple mediums, including photography, printmaking, videography, collaging, and illustration, with photography at the forefront of their practice. Their personal work encompasses self-portraits, writing, collages, and conceptual photo shoots that they shoot, edit, and creatively direct. Jemiye’s artistry reflects their personal journey and evolving identity as a non-binary individual. Each piece serves as a visual timeline mapping their experiences, struggles, and growth, creating dialogue between past, present, and future selves as a gender non-conforming, Black, queer, African body.

A central strand of their practice in their final year of undergraduate study is a photo series rooted in the Igbo iconography of the Ikenga. Traditionally, the Ikenga is a sculptural symbol of personal achievement, spiritual strength, and ancestral guidance—often associated with masculinity, power, and one’s chi (personal deity or spiritual double). In this series, Jemiye reimagines and embodies the Ikenga through their own body embodying themselves as both sculpture and spirit. This act of embodiment functions as both a tribute to Igbo heritage and a reclamation of ancestral power through a contemporary, queer and deeply personal lens.

This year, they are exploring how the aesthetics and symbolism of Iconography in Africa that can be translated into visual forms that collapse the boundaries between object and subject, past and present, spiritual and corporeal. The work raises questions about how cultural identity, spirituality, and self-actualization intersect, particularly for those navigating fragmented or diasporic connections to tradition. At once homage and assertion, the series speaks to the resilience of cultural memory and the possibilities of self-authorship.

In their final stage of undergraduate studies, Jemiye is expanding beyond photography to develop the project into an installation that incorporates video and sound. By layering contemporary and cultural elements, they are experimenting with how multiple mediums can honor tradition while also speaking to the fluidity of identity in a globalized present. Across all forms, their final-year practice is a culmination of explorations of identity, ancestry, and transformation, situating the body as both archive and vessel. Through this, they continue to cultivate a visual language that bridges personal narrative and collective history, laying the foundation for future work beyond their degree.

Kabelo Mofokeng

Kabelo Mofokeng is an artist, photographer, and cultural worker living and working in Johannesburg. Mofokeng’s practice spans moving image, photography, and installation, often turning a critical eye towards the systems that govern cultural and institutional life.

Kabelo’s early academic background began in film studies at AFDA, where they developed a sensitivity to narrative, framing, and visual storytelling. This foundation extended into a deep engagement with photography, both in independent practice and through collaborative work. Alongside this artistic development, Mofokeng has worked within non-profit art spaces, gaining first-hand experience of the cultural sector not only as an artist but as an administrator. Roles in art administration, project coordination, and gallery liaison have informed their nuanced understanding of the ways institutions function, and sometimes falter, in their promises of care, support, and sustainability.

Their academic path has been shaped by diverse learning contexts, including AFDA, VEGA, and the Market Photo Workshop, which together fostered a layered approach to visual language, critical theory, and cultural production. These experiences underpin Mofokeng’s current ability to navigate both practical and conceptual dimensions of art-making. In 2024, Kabelo enrolled in the BA Honours in Fine Art programme at Wits University. Their current body of research and practice, The Bureaucratic Office of Care, explores care as a system, one that in the art world often reveals itself as transactional, conditional, or unevenly distributed.

Mofokeng has exhibited in several contexts: at the State Theatre in Pretoria in 2019, where their work was shown alongside a drag queen pageant during an internship with the NPO OUT,  an organisation focused on gender diversity, sex education, and legal advice; and in the group exhibition marking the completion of the Advanced Photography programme at the Market Photo Workshop later that year. Their work has also been presented online, extending these engagements to digital platforms.

Karabo Monyemangene

Karabo Tshinakaho Monyemangene (b. 2003, Polokwane) is a Johannesburg-based interdisciplinary artist working across video, performance, printmaking, photography, and installation. Currently completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand, her practice navigates Black interiority, memory, misrecognition, and the layered process of becoming.

Often turning to the personal and familial archive, Karabo creates space for complex, shifting identities and the tension between presence and absence. Central to her practice is the Setlokwa concept of “Re gona” a grounding philosophy that maps a deep sensitivity to the fluidity of identity and intimate histories.

Keabetse Maake

Keabetse Maake (b. 2004, Tembisa) is a South African interdisciplinary artist based in Braamfontein, Johannesburg. Their work explores identity, memory, and emotion through immersive, sensory-driven experiences. Living with borderline personality disorder, Maake uses colour as a central language to express internal states and build worlds where fantasy and reality meet.

Working across spatial design, textiles, printmaking, photography, and object-making, their practice transforms emotion into form, evoking joy, nostalgia, and play. Grounded in love and sustainability, Maake’s art exists between colour and minimalism, sound and silence, offering spaces that invite deep feeling and reflection.

Khanyisa Brancon

Khanyisa Agnes Brancon (b. 2002, Tzaneen, Limpopo) is a Johannesburg-based interdisciplinary artist from Polokwane. She holds a BAFA from the University of the Witwatersrand. Working across photography, printmaking, and installation, Brancon explores textiles as vessels of memory and materiality, unravelling layered histories and timelines. Her practice is a process of reclamation—centering themes of spatial genealogy, colonial erasure, maternal lineage, and indigenous knowledge systems. Through meditative and conceptually rigorous works, she reflects on the presence of the past and the resilience of cultural memory

Khetho Mkhaliphi

Khetho Nkosingiphile Mkhaliphi is a Johannesburg-based artist and filmmaker. His personal
artistic practice is a humanistic inquiry into the ‘musicality of self,’ drawing from Ntu cosmology
and mystical philosophies to explore pathways to wholeness and harmony.

Mkhaliphi is the co-founder of Redbeam Productions, a venture focused on producing and distributing independent films with bold visions and diverse perspectives. Previously, he founded and curated The Arcade, a virtual art gallery (2022-2023), and held a brief internship at The Point of Order Art Gallery (2022). His artwork was featured in the “ME/WE” Fine Art group exhibition at The Point of Art Gallery (2023). He is currently completing his BA in Fine Arts at Wits University (expected 2026).

Khothatso Mphuthi

My practice interrogates how identity is shaped and performed through the intersecting lenses of class and gender within Black communities. I use drawing as a way to focus on the subtle rituals and social codes that define belonging and how something as ordinary as a meal, a fork, or a pair of shoes can mark one as either “too Black” or “not Black enough.” Drawing, as my visual language, is used and overlaid by printmaking, and mixed media as I examine the quiet violence embedded in everyday performances of respectability and aspiration.

My work embodies the tension of navigating opposing social expectations. It becomes a satirical yet deeply personal symbol of othering, code-switching, and internal conflict. My use of materials such as charcoal, lithography, and ink allows for both precision and distortion, mirroring how identity itself is constantly negotiated and redefined.

Ritual slaughter, corporate consumption, and gestures of civility are placed in proximity to question where violence truly resides in tradition, or in the systems that have redefined value and purity. Inspired by theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Pierre Bourdieu and Bulhan, my work situates personal experience within broader socio-political structures, revealing how taste, language, and behaviour operate as tools of inclusion and exclusion.

Ultimately, my practice seeks to visualise the fragility of belonging and to ask what happens when identity is stripped, performed, or broken open, exposing what lies beneath the polished surface.

 

Khothatso Mphuthi is a multimedia artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa, whose practice engages deeply with the politics of identity, perception, and belonging. Working primarily in drawing, printmaking, and sculpture, Mphuthi explores how Black identity is negotiated and contested across social, cultural, and physical landscapes.

His body of work  employs satire and symbolism to unpack class tensions, code-switching, and the othering experienced within Black communities. Through figures and objects characterised by exaggeration and introspection, Mphuthi challenges notions of cultural authenticity, examining how both internal conflict and the external gaze shape identity. He is interested in how markers of “success” or “respectability” are simultaneously celebrated and weaponized within the Black community. The symbols that he works with, whether clothing, gestures, or everyday objects, operate as more than just material representations; they become charged vehicles through which alienation is enacted.

His work seeks to unpack what these symbols mean when layered onto the Black body, and how they construct notions of “authentic” or “inauthentic” Blackness. By deconstructing the power attached to these objects and cultural signifiers, Mphuthi exposes the tension of performing identity within environments shaped by colonial residues, class divides, and the persistent need to prove one’s legitimacy.

Koketso Letsoalo

This work begins with soil, intended to be seen as the same soil scattered by mourners as they whisper their final farewells. Here, soil does not bury a body but inscribes words, fragile and heavy at once. It speaks to silences, to what grief leaves unsaid, to the weight of finality that language cannot soften.

Beneath the writing rests a bed of paper flowers. At graves, flowers are laid atop the mound of earth, small offerings of beauty against loss. These flowers, crafted from paper, resist decay, holding the impossible wish for permanence and a forever bloom, a forever life. Around the work, more flowers wait to be placed by visitors, transforming the piece into a shared act of mourning, a ritual of collective memory.

And yet grief is not only shared; it is solitary. A single chair marks this truth that when the rituals are over, absence is faced alone. Beside it, a bottle of water recalls the care offered at funerals, but also the thirst of the body, the way grief inhabits flesh as much as spirit.

This work is a meditation on endings and remembrance, where soil, flowers, and silence meet in the place between holding on and letting go.

Kwena Makama

Mugu wa Monono is an installation that weaves together film, book, and memory to honour the life and spiritual journey of my grandmother, Boledi. The title, meaning “fertile soil,” reflects who she is; grounded, nurturing, and full of quiet strength. Her story, like rich earth, holds depth, growth, and the resilience passed through generations.

The film captures her voice as she recounts her early life: her upbringing, her introduction to the Zion Christian Church (ZCC) and her marriage.It reveals the essence of who she is; her humour, faith, and courage, offering an intimate look into the world that shaped her.

The book deepens this narrative, pairing our conversations with photographs and reflections that expand on her wisdom. Together, the film and book exist in conversation, one breathing life, the other holding memory. Mubo wa Monono invites viewers to reflect on the people who raised us, the stories we inherit, and the sacred ground they leave behind.

Kwena Makama (b. 2001, Polokwane, Limpopo, South Africa) is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and freelance photographer based between Johannesburg and Pretoria. Her practice navigates the intersections of spirituality, memory, and post-colonial Black existence through performance, video, installation, sculpture, photography, and oral history, to explore faith, identity, belonging, and cultural continuity.

She defines herself primarily as a storyteller. Her work responds to urgent personal and collective questions that shape her lived experience. Rooted in both personal and generational memory, her practice reflects a continuous process of self-examination: a deep unpacking of inherited belief systems, familial and social histories, and the evolving experience of Black womanhood.

For Makama, artmaking is both a healing and political act, it is an intimate method of honouring marginalised voices while confronting dominant narratives. Through this process, she engages art as both a form of expression and a transformative space for reflection, resistance, and reclamation.

Lebogang Mashigo

Lebogang Mashigo (b. 2001) is a multidisciplinary artist from Pretoria, currently based in Johannesburg. Their work explores themes of identity, memory, Black femininity, and the politics of interiority through experimental film, performance, and writing. Grounded in a feminist and archival impulse, their practice blends analog textures, personal narrative, and critical theory to disrupt dominant narratives and create space for vulnerable self-expression.

Their recent work includes TNT 01, a VHS short film interrogating surveillance, glitch aesthetics, and performance. Their ongoing project Seeing Red continues this inquiry, using colour, silence, and embodiment to trace a journey of becoming and emotional survival.

Their artistic approach is deeply committed to work that challenges, mourns, resists — and dreams.

Naledi Lebeko

My work is looking at another concern with the body, it now extends its reading,  which is seeing the body as a site of humility. I approach the body as a metaphor  and as a form through which I explore the act and the feeling of being humiliated.  I have begun to understand the body in my work not as an image but as an  orientation and as a metaphor that can point to states of lowering, of being  brought down and those of softening into vulnerability. The piece presented  depicts two abstracted bodies that appear to be folding and shrinking downward,  thus, giving a gestural sense of humility. The figures are not immediately  identifiable as male or female, yet on closer observation the back of their bodies  reveal traces of feminine bodies. Their heads give a sense of phallic forms, and  that is to confront and negotiate conversations about men and their phallus.

For me these two bodies stand in dialogue with one another. Their open bellies  become channels through which women of different generations speak to each  other, encourage each other and share experiences of what has been carried in  and onto their bodies. These ‘holes’ on their bodies are metaphors for ongoing  conversations about pleasure, pain, violence, and survival between these  women. On their bellies/chests, one body offers an input, and the other offers an  output, together they suggest a cycle of exchange that continues without any  closure. Their bodies are placed side by side; by doing this, they are creating a  space of collective reflection. They embody how women sustain one another  through listening, through speaking and through the vulnerability of opening up. 

Naledi Lebeko is a Johannesburg based visual artist working primarily in  sculpture, printmaking, and photography. She is currently completing her Fine Art  degree at the University of the Witwatersrand, while in her practice she critically  investigates representation, abstraction, and the politicised body through a deconstructed and feminist lens. She engages with clay, print, and photographic  media, to interrogate how meaning is constructed through form, process, and  visual language. Her sculptural work centres on abstracted figurative forms that  resist rigid categorisation thus challenging dominant narratives around gender,  power, and bodily legibility. She is particularly concerned with how the body is  fragmented, distorted, and coded through ideological structures, and she uses  abstraction as a strategy to undo visual conventions tied to the gaze, the phallus,  and normative anatomy. In this space, her work becomes a site of resistance,  reflection, and possibility.  

Naledi Lephoto

This work continues my exploration of the absence of a father. Last year, I examined absent fatherhood in a broad and general sense. Now, I narrow my focus to the intimate space of my own experience, where memory, silence, and care intersect. I am drawn to the grey areas of absence, the aspects rarely spoken about. What does absence mean for the parent who leaves, and equally, for the parent who stays? How does absence inscribe itself into the daily rhythms of a household, and into the body of a child growing within it?

As a child, I felt compelled to fill the space my father left behind. I became attuned to my mother’s struggles, both those caused by him and those that were her own. In trying to lighten her load, I learned to shrink my needs, to fold myself smaller so that she carries less. For years, I believed I was simply being kind, considerate, and sensible. Only now, in adulthood, do I recognise that what I developed was a saviour complex: a compulsion to solve the problems of others, even at the expense of myself.

Through performance, I revisit these inheritances of absence and presence. My work becomes a practice of listening to the silences of my father, to the weight my mother carried, and to the ways I absorbed both. In making these dynamics visible, I seek not resolution, but recognition.

Ngoma KaMphahlele

Ngoma KaMphahlele is a South African visual artist specializing in photography, exploring themes like migration, home, identity, and belonging. Influenced by South Africa’s diverse cultures, he graduated from the Market Photo Workshop in 2018. His work often reflects personal and shared stories of displacement and longing. Notable achievements include the 2023/24 “Bazobuya” a group exhibition, showcasing his “JazzLand” photo series and the 2018 Thami Mnyele Ekurhuleni Award. Currently, he is further developing “JazzLand” within academic frameworks, refining his craft and pushing artistic boundaries. KaMphahlele’s compelling photography invites viewers to contemplate roots and the quest for a sense of home.
Through his photography, KaMphahlele seeks to challenge stereotypes and reframe narratives around Black identity and history, creating thought-provoking images that invite reflection on societal change. His research also focuses on what it means for a Black male photographer to operate a camera—an instrument historically linked to visual violence—and to document Black spaces of joy and cultural expression, particularly within township jazz communities like Katlehong. Ultimately, his work strives to bridge past and present, promoting reconciliation and a deeper understanding of South Africa’s complex social fabric.

Nonhlanhla Mlauzi

“What they do with my hands”

I work with materials that carry memory-fabric, thread, weight. Things that hold stories, even when no one is speaking. This work holds what has been passed down: quiet responsibilities, unspoken roles, the feeling of always needing to be strong. I’m not showing these things like a story. I’m letting them sit in the materials-layered, folded, stitched together. Some burdens don’t make noise. They show up in the body, in tired backs, in hands that give without pause. My work comes from a place where caring becomes routine, and support becomes heavy. Wrapped brick might stand in for a mother, not in likeness, but in function: foundational, overlooked, bearing more than it shows. The cloth that binds it softens the weight but never removes it. It remembers how she held everything together without ever being held herself. A seam might carry an apology that was never said, tucked inside the fold, where words fray before they’re spoken. It binds two edges that once belonged apart, mending a history no one would admit had torn. The thread doesn’t speak, but it tugs, a quiet gesture toward what could have been healed if only someone had the language. I’m not trying to record memory like a photo. I’m building the shape it leaves behind. Something that leans, that creaks, that sometimes holds more than it should. Every object and texture speaks about what we inherit, not in money or land, but in gestures, expectations, and silence. This work is about the tension between love and exhaustion. About how soft things can hold hard truths. How memory, duty, and trauma live in the body, especially in the hands, where care becomes reflex and giving becomes muscle memory. The hands remember what the mouth couldn’t say. They reach, they mend, they carry until they forget how to rest.

Nonhlanhla Mlauzi (b. 2003, South Africa) is a multidisciplinary visual artist whose practice moves between memory, identity, and inheritance. Her work begins with the personal but extends into the collective, asking how stories are carried, altered, and remembered across generations. Raised in a Seventh-day Adventist household, she draws on the rituals, silences, and traditions that shaped her, weaving them together with the larger histories of kinship and belief.

She works with fabric, thread, found objects, and photographic archives, treating these materials not only as mediums but as carriers of memory. Cloth becomes a living document, marked by use, wear, and care, holding traces of the body and of time. By stitching and layering, she creates spaces where absence and presence coexist, where silence becomes a language, and where ordinary materials hold the weight of loss, sacrifice, and transformation.

Her work resists quick readings. Instead of shouting, it leans into quiet gestures. Pieces hum, pause, and wait, asking the viewer to sit with them rather than decode them. Through this, Mlauzi explores how art can be both tender and resistant, how it can hold grief and healing at once.

By bringing together intimate and communal traces, she builds work that is grounded in personal memory yet reaches toward shared histories. The result is a practice that is as much about care and reflection as it is about form, making art that lingers beyond the gallery space, whispering of entangled histories and the fragile bonds that hold families and communities together.

Lelami Ngoqo

Lelami enjoys creating installations that are deeply personal and intimate. Through her work, she constructs immersive worlds that draw viewers into a trans experience. Over the past few years, she has developed a distinct visual and conceptual language, particularly through her video performances and their interaction with other elements in her installations, whether that be light, sound, or objects. Nothing in her spaces is placed arbitrarily; every component exists in intentional relation to another, often with careful attention to even the smallest of details.

In recent work, Lelami has been exploring the surveillance of trans bodies. Rather than forcing ideas into existence, she has learned to let concepts emerge organically from her lived experiences. Earlier in the year, she mapped out numerous ideas in preparation for upcoming projects, but she has since realized that her everyday experiences as a trans person are in constant dialogue with the work she produces. By connecting her emotions to her everyday interactions, new ideas arise naturally, serving as a kind of resolution. This process has become therapeutic for her, as the emotions she feels are transformed into physical manifestations through her installations.

Lelami’s work is heavily inspired by Wu Tsang, particularly in the way Tsang challenges and manipulates mediums within installation art. Lelami finds resonance in Tsang’s work on trans representation and has drawn inspiration from her to help refine her own practice.

Looking ahead, Lelami aims to continue exploring themes of trans representation. She hopes to engage more actively with her community, helping to tell their shared stories in order to affirm their humanity, emphasizing that trans people are not statistics, not trends, and not objects, but real individuals with complex lives and voices.

Lelami has explored a variety of art media. As much as she loves making sculptures she has also started to enjoy creating installations. She loves taking over a space, claiming it and making it into her own, personalising it with her own objects that carry a sentimental value to her. She feels like it is a way of creating life, as if the objects are little organs that all serve a purpose and the space is an organism and in that way she becomes god in that space. Her
work explores femininity and the trans experience through installations that are usually composed of video performances, soundscapes and objects that hold a feminine significance to her. Her conversation is ever-evolving as she undergoes her medical trans journey, through her hormonal changes she is starting to explore the way her mind and body
are transforming.

Odwa Sithunzela

This work takes you through my first stages of grief. It explores the desire to heal without forgetting. In the process of making, I participate in a ritual of energy transfer through unconventional printmaking. This process involves the layering of canvas under the painting I will be working on. Through physical engagement with the painting, abstract traces of energy are printed on the canvas underneath. This process is important to this journey as it speaks to unforgettable memories, marks, wounds, stains, and traces left by trauma. The second part of my work involves my everyday life and practices. I take you to the little moments of my life that remind me of the space I now inhabit. A space between worlds. I find myself drawn to the lifelessness of dead things that still exist, things that are thought to be dead, but in reality, no one knows for sure. I’m drawn to their silence, emptiness, and the absence of what was once. I am mostly thinking about how lifeless things are never cared for, how being lifeless means you cannot care for yourself anymore, how graves get dirty and need to be cared for by the living, how we normally perceive dirt, how we often feel about dirty things, how we feel about ourselves when we are dirty, and how there are a lot more things you cannot do when you are dead. I wonder, where does that leave you as a dead individual? What happens to you? What exactly is required to be done? What does it mean for a living person who is confronted with these kinds of realities?

Odwa Sithunzela (b. 2004, Tembisa) is a visual artist based in Midrand, Johannesburg.
Working primarily in painting, alongside printmaking, and photography. Sithunzela
explores themes of death, home, love, grief, ritual, indigenous knowledge systems, and
lineage. Her practice is deeply rooted in personal and ancestral memory, drawing on
emotional and cultural landscapes to reflect on the interconnectedness of the self, spirit, and community. Best known for her evocative paintings, Sithunzela weaves visual narratives that honor both lived experience and inherited wisdom, inviting viewers into a space of reflection, remembrance, and cultural continuity.

Olebogeng Esemang

Olebogeng Esemang (b. 2001) is a Soweto-born multidisciplinary artist currently completing a Bachelor of Fine Art at the University of the Witwatersrand. Their practice is an outpouring of self; honest, intuitive, and grounded in lived experience. Working experimentally across painting, sculpture, and installation, they approaches materials as active collaborators, allowing intuition and process to guide their hand.

Esemang’s work draws deeply from personal and familial histories, engaging memory not as something fixed, but as something fluid, constantly moving, shifting, and living. Through their explorations of form and texture, they seek to give memory shape and presence, building a living archive that holds what has been as well as what continues to unfold.

They often approaches their practice as a process of excavation, layering materials and symbols to reveal fragments of past and present. Within this interplay, their work becomes a site where personal and collective memory converge, inviting viewers to engage with their own emotional landscapes and histories. Rather than providing fixed answers, their work remains open-ended of a quiet invitation toward reflection, reinterpretation, and encounter.

Their ongoing dialogue with interiority, nostalgia, and subconscious narratives manifests as visual explorations of selfhood through poetic meditations on belonging, time, and transformation.

Esemang’s work has been included in several group exhibitions, including ME, WE at The Point of Order, Braamfontein, South Africa (2023); Ne Keo Gopotse in Tlokweng, Gaborone, Botswana, curated by Mbako Kago Moemise (2024); Limpopo Arts Festival in Burgersfort, Limpopo (2024); and Y2K?, held by Superswag Studios at Braam Social Club, Braamfontein, South Africa (2025).

Owethu Malusi

Owethu Malusi (b. 2002) is a Johannesburg-based artist whose practice explores the feminine as a corruptive power through the exploration of isiXhosa folktales and her pole dance practice

Palesa Cenge

Palesa Cenge (b. 2003 Johannesburg) is a painter whose work celebrates the quiet beauty of Black resilience, the everyday moments where struggle and joy intertwine. Her art is an ode to nostalgia, weaving fragments of memory to recreate the warmth of township homes.

This isn’t a romanticization of hardship but a reclamation. She remembers the chaos overcrowded houses, absent fathers, unspoken tensions but chooses to spotlight the tenderness that persisted. The tangle of siblings glued to *Ugugu no Mazwi*, drunk uncles snoring in corners, aunts clapping back about child support, the scent of *umqombothi* and burnt *pap* in the air. Yet, there was always laughter. Dancing in the yard until neighbours yelled. Turning a single blanket into a shared fort for five.

Philani Mpontshane

Philani Mpontshane (b. 2001, South Africa) is a visual artist whose practice emerged on platforms like YouTube and Instagram during the 2020 lockdown, coinciding with his first year studying Film and Television at the University of the Witwatersrand. Now completing his Honours in Fine Art at the same institution, Mpontshane’s work continues to navigate the space between the screen and the self. He investigates how the internet reshapes identity, proposing that users increasingly perform their real lives in alignment with their virtual selves. 

Drawing on simulation theory and spiritual inquiry, his films—Paranoia’s Gaze, Between the Scenes, and Spare Rib—interrogate hypervisibility, digital spectatorship, and the psychological residue of online life. These works stage subtle yet powerful interventions that unsettle the viewer’s position and prompt a reckoning with the disembodied rituals of digital culture, while yearning toward a more grounded, embodied mode of being.

Risima Masinge

Risima Masinge is a Johannesburg based artist and photographer. Her practice covers themes of narrative, communication, neurodivergence, psychology, and the mundane human experience. 

To address these themes, her practice includes the use of photography, video, sound, mixed media installation, printmaking and text and digital art in an experimental form. This not only focuses on the experimentation of art processes and techniques but also aims to question the application, uses and purpose of the themes covered in her work and her practice as a whole.

Masinge also looks at the idea(s) of subjectivity, objectivity, introspection, extrospection, perception and positionality of subject(s) individually and as a collective in a space or environment in relation to her art and practice.

Her current work focuses on stimming (self-stimulating behaviours) and specifically experiments with visual and auditory stimming as a way to explore information and sensory processing and input. It is part of the ongoing exploration of the themes of stimulation, response, communication, regulation, sensory and information processing, neurodivergence, time and motion. 

She’s experimenting with the use of recorded stims to create a new stim through looping and repetition using objects ranging from fidget toys to random objects. The aim is to create a sensory environment where the audience observes stimming with limited to no context similar to how it is exhibited or seen in everyday life.

 

Sam Jokazi

Sam Jokazi is a South African visual artist whose practice explores memory, identity, and intergenerational healing. Drawing from personal and cultural histories, Sam uses storytelling and visual language to confront themes of loss, resilience, and remembrance. Their work often revisits silenced narratives, bringing to light the intimate bonds between past and present, absence and presence. Working across mixed media, photography, and painting, Sam seeks to create spaces where memory is not only preserved but reimagined as a tool for reflection and collective healing.

Their ongoing series Rememory is rooted in a single photograph of Sam’s late mother. This fragment of memory becomes a generative source, reworked into a body of imagined images that speak to the life she could have lived. Through these re-creations, Sam builds an archive that extends beyond what death cut short, crafting portraits that capture her style, humor, parental love, and care, even though these experiences were never lived. The series is both an act of mourning and of resistance: refusing to let memory fade, while also challenging how personal histories are often fragmented or erased.

Inspired by Toni Morrison’s  and Lebahang Kganye, the work acknowledges that painful memories refuse to be forgotten; instead, they insist on return. In this way, Rememory becomes a process of reanimation, where silhouetted memories take form and where storytelling becomes a means of release, healing, and reconnection.

Through this practice, Sam transforms personal grief into a broader meditation on how memory can hold pain and love at once. The work highlights the urgency of remembering, not only for oneself but also for future generations, preserving stories that might otherwise remain untold.

Samihah Ismail-Ebrahim

Connections take place all around us, within us. The connection between people, with other people; a mother and her child, the connections of our minds to our souls, the connections of our veins and arteries to our hearts. The question is what lies within these connections? The lines that attach us to another. What comprises that link?

Connections take place, but we do not consciously acknowledge how these connections impact us. The people we surround ourselves with…Do they uplift you? Do they bring health and prosperity to you? Do they add to your happiness? Or, do they hurt you? Do they constantly berate you? Do they add to your worries?  The heart beats for those who bring health to it, and bruises when being ill-treated.

There is a significant power within connection, it is the chain that binds or breaks.

 

Siphokazi Matshaka

Life as a Pigeon, Nke ke le leba

Animals are ever-present in my dreams. In this drawing, I depict a pigeon, an animal often abandoned by humanity, yet one that continues to adapt and survive. It reflects the persistence of overlooked beings and the quiet resilience within the dream world.

—

Siphokazi Matshaka is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily in doll-making, digital art, animation, and painting. Her practice explores and translates the dreamscape as a means of self-discovery and ancestral connection. Drawing on rich, vibrant colour palettes and recurring motifs such as eyes, stars, cows, and rabbits, she crafts visual languages that speak to both the seen and the unseen. Through her work, Siphokazi invites audiences to engage with their own inner worlds, forgotten narratives, and dream lives as pathways to deeper understanding.

Siphosethu Jikwana

Siphosethu Jikwana is a Johannesburg-based multidisciplinary artist. Working across sculpture and installation, Jikwana’s practice explores the emotional and psychological residue of trauma, anxiety, and inherited memory, often drawing on objects and garments as extensions of the body and its histories.

Through materially engaged processes, Jikwana investigates how everyday items such as denim, domestic worker uniforms, and symbolic objects within the taxi industry can hold ancestral, personal, and collective trauma. His research into the taxi industry considers it as a contested site shaped by histories of labor, violence, resistance, and survival, while also functioning as a vital space of movement, community, and economy. His work raises questions around paralysis, presence, and the cyclical nature of trauma across generations — particularly in post-apartheid South Africa.

Deeply influenced by theories of embodiment, space, and the unspeakable nature of trauma, Jikwana uses art as a medium to articulate what resists language. His installations and sculptural works offer moments of introspection and emotional regulation, prompting viewers to consider how memory is carried, performed, and possibly healed.

Siyabonga Makhubela

If Siyabonga Makhubela was not practicing art he says that he would probably be playing professional football somewhere in Europe. Born and raised in Pretoria his work predominantly encapsulates the essence of Pretoria from his lenses. He primarily works in Printmaking to illustrate scenes he has captured with his own eyes or through photographs.

He was born in 2002 in what is deemed as a “Born Free” era and his works usually explores
the cultural material that exists in the post-apartheid state of South Africa. He is currently studying Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg where he currently resides and also draws inspiration from.

Siyamthanda Buthelezi

Siyamthanda Buthelezi is a visual artist from Johannesburg whose practice explores Black identity, African feminism, community, and kinship. Working primarily with mixed media, she weaves together portraiture and textile to examine the intimate and collective experiences that shape Black womanhood.

Her work often combines wool, paint, and other tactile materials to create visual metaphors for care, memory, and interconnection. Through acts of weaving, layering, and mending, she engages with histories of labour and resilience embedded in women’s domestic and creative practices. Her pieces celebrate the warmth, complexity, and endurance of Black female relationships, reframing intimacy as a radical expression of strength and survival.

Rooted in everyday encounters and gatherings, her practice serves as both an archive and a gesture of preservation, honouring the women who nurture and sustain their communities. Through her exploration of materiality and form, she seeks to create a language of texture that reflects the interconnectedness of human relationships and the power of collective identity.

Siyasanga Ngqengqeza

What happens when isiXhosa enters a space that was never designed to hold it? When code fails to recognise the language, is that failure mine, or does it belong to the system that cannot imagine me? I keep asking what lies beneath the red underline. Is it simply correction, or does it mark refusal, resistance, presence? What does it mean for a language to be flagged as an error, not because it is broken, but because it does not fit? If syntax is a kind of order, then whose logic structures it, and who is excluded by it? Every error message leaves a trace. It does not only reveal what has collapsed, but also what was never meant to be accommodated.

What, then, can be made from what the system rejects? Can the glitch be more than an interruption, can it open a passage, a space to stay with rather than something to repair? The prints I produce from translated watercolour paintings seem to speak to this elsewhere. They read like cartographies without coordinates, a language stretched across a surface, perhaps maps of something unsettled. I return to these questions deliberately, not to resolve them, but to remain inside the negotiation they demand. To dwell in the space where something begins to speak back, where refusal becomes its own form of articulation.

Siyasanga Ngqengqeza (b. 1999, Eastern Cape) is an emerging multidisciplinary artist working across watercolour painting, coding, game creation, printmaking, and beading. Her practice moves between language, technology, and inheritance, questioning what it means to be misread, mistranslated, or excluded in systems that were not built with her language or body in mind. 

Grounded in both Fine Arts and Computer Science, her work is shaped by an interest in refusal, opacity, and the quiet labour of navigating what remains unseen. She draws from African feminist and decolonial thought to consider how knowledge is held, encoded, and sometimes withheld, especially within algorithmic and visual cultures. 

Based in Johannesburg, her work resists easy legibility and remains in conversation with ancestral memory, digital tension, and the imaginative labour of elsewhere.

Slindile Mzobe

Slindile Precious Mzobe (born August 14, 2003) is a South African multimedia artist whose work spans theatre, performance art, painting, textiles, and durational installation. From her classical training at Inanda Seminary Institute in theatre and voice, she has evolved into a multidisciplinary artist with a deeply personal and culturally rooted vision.

In 2021, Mzobe debuted internationally at the World Monologue Games—an Australian virtual acting competition—earning 7th place in the youth category. This early recognition propelled her forward, and in 2023 she won the Best Young Female Actress award at the International Model and Talent Agency showcase in New York. That distinction led to a contract with Terry Knickerbocker Studio.

At the heart of Mzobe’s practice is a defiant resilience cultivated through confronting external stereotypes and systemic biases that seek to define “Blackness” narrowly. She channels this into articulating her multifaceted identities through visual and performative forms. Her studio practice oscillates between mixed-media paintings and tapestries—using glass beads, multi‑colored yarns, needlework, and durational performance as acts of self-love and cultural reclamation.

Inspired by the textures, shapes, and colors of traditional Zulu attire, Mzobe crafts immersive installations that challenge prevailing narratives and forge new pathways toward authenticity. Her work dialogically bridges personal history with collective stories of womanhood, virtue, and femininity. Ultimately, her journey of self-discovery transcends aesthetic expression—it becomes an act of reclaiming agency, rooted in ancestral connections and shared heritage.

Thabiso Kholobeng

Thabiso Kholobeng is a Professional Printmaker, artist, Education and Training Practitioner.  Whose works are influenced by his inability to see correctly. Informed by being born a squint. He uses multilayering and patterns to create a sense of blurriness on the prints. The images are taken by camera as an everyday aesthetics of his daily activities and moments moving between Soweto and Johannesburg. The photographs are layered, collaged and transferred onto an emulsion coated screen or photolithography plate and printed onto paper.

Thabiso trained as a Printmaker at Artist Proof Studio in Johannesburg, Newtown from 2007 to 2009 and graduated to being a Professional printmaker receiving a national certificate Design Foundation NQF level 4 and obtained an Occupational Directed-ETDP Seta with EDL Foundation and Very Cool Ideas in 2009 and 2013 respectively. In 2015 he enrolled at the Tamarind Institute of Lithography in New Mexico, Albuquerque in the USA, where he honed his skills of being Planographic Printing Process printmaker. 

Thenjiwe Mkhandabila

Thenjiwe Mkhandabila (b. 2003) is a Johannesburg-based visual artist and writer currently completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her multidisciplinary practice weaves together textiles, Zulu cultural motifs, and personal narrative to challenge colonial and patriarchal representations of Black women in South African society. Rooted in decolonial feminist thought, her work foregrounds storytelling as a form of resistance, often incorporating traditional materials like grass mats and embroidery to honour inherited knowledge systems. Thenjiwe’s art reclaims the objectified Black female body as a site of power, care, and cultural memory.

Tiana Nikolov

Their current body of work, ‘Intravenous Collapse (Cold from the Inside)’ (2025), presents a multi-video and sonic installation in a dark, vacant space, the only visible light emanating from the projectors. The translucent black veil, onto which the primary video is projected, is suspended from the ceiling in such a manner that it looks as if it was floating on its own. The video shone onto the veil casts a ghostly double-image against the wall behind it. 

‘Intravenous Collapse (Cold from the Inside)’ addresses the often complex and inarticulable experience of dissociation, specifically its spatial and psychosomatic dimensions, depicting the world through the lens of someone who embodies this reality. The edges where the body ends and the world begins, blur. Cold fluids rush through the veins, not separate, not surface. Deeper. A fracture in reality and perception. The body is suspended outside of time. 

Absence, not as a missing another but rather as an absence of the self, is rooted in this work, fragmented and dislocated at the site of the self’s beginning: the home.

 

Tiana Nikolov (b. 2003), known affectionately as “T”, is a Johannesburg-based artist of Bulgarian heritage, whose practice ponders themes of remembrance, domestic spaces, intimacy, nostalgia, altered realities, and relational trauma through lens-based media.

Working primarily through videography, photography, and sound, Tiana fabricates immersive multi-video installations accompanied by otherworldly soundscapes, provoking contemplation from their viewers and listeners. 

Their current research explores their practice’s rendering of the affective experiences of dissociation and the fragmented self of the feminine body, using the home as a site of exploration. 

Tiana seeks to infuse each piece, in and outside of the lens, with an emotional charge, offering a space for cathartic release and expression of that which often escapes words.

Toby Ngomane

MHUDE MHUDE SBHAMU SENYONI
My practice is interested in personal freedoms, personal histories, narratives of self and constructions of self and how those constructions and how the self that has been constructed in this lifetime impacts the people around me and the world and how it shapes my world. Not how I imagine my world is shaped, but how I quite literally construct my world because of all of these personal histories, and how those constructions eventually impact collective freedom. In the case of Mhude Mhude Sbhamu Senyoni, what began as a question around how violent men are constructed, I was eventually led to reflect on my constructions of manhood and ways of healing and releasing hurts that no longer served me. This grappling led me to understand myself as being in an ongoing journey between boyhood (as time and state) and manhood. I was thinking through this constant movement between states and sensibilities by borrowing the idea of nomadic masculinity from Dr Siphiwe Dube.

This sense of multitude in movement takes the form of the double edged razor blade. The blade presents a multitude of readings, the obvious being danger and perhaps violence, but I also call on the relationships that black men (in particular) have with the blade, one of grooming and communal intimacy. Moreover, closer inspection begins to reveal the altered states of the blades and all the ways they have been tempered.

I use the material of the altered blades to propose a more nuanced and complicated understanding of what and how the blade can represent. Additionally, the process of working the blades was slow, gentle and present, inducing a meditative state of reflection which resulted in further understanding the blades as a reliable companion. This, I propose, is the complication and nuance of male spaces.

Furthermore, in spaces of grooming, the blade becomes a tool of vulnerability, intimacy and
communal gathering while still holding the sense of internal anxiety and displacement that I feel when in spaces of the performative hypermasculine (a state I argue that is present in most men)

The installation tries to, through its choreography, create a sense of movement through the different materialities of the objects and then an internal agentic movement in the viewer/ enactor of space, which hopefully arrives, not at an answer but at questioning and challenging of the self.

 

Toby Ngomane is a Mpumalanga-born, Joburg-based human. This interdisciplinary creative has over 10 years of experience working in the creative space.

With a deep interest and specialisation in body-based work, he has taken to understanding the body as a vessel that is continuously receptive to the sensations in and around it and consequently, the curiosity of how this vessel understands and translates the world through different disciplines, whether they be traditionally performative or not.

Throughout his career, he has worked with award-winning artists, including Nomcebisi Moyikwa, Nondumiso Msimanga, Gavin Krastin, and Gary Gordon.

Toby is currently enrolled in the Honours program in Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he is thinking between print-making and installation work and working through years of research around conceptions of gender, childhood and the constructions of ‘manhood’ and becoming.

He is also an endurance athlete whose focus is on ultra-distance mountain running.

Tshegofatso Letwaba

Tshegofatso Letwaba is a multidisciplinary artist and curator whose work explores themes of care, intimacy, and identity through flowers, drawing, and written reflection. Best known for her floral creations, Tshegofatso transforms ephemeral botanicals into immersive experiences that speak to love, celebration, and the quiet poetry of everyday life. Each bouquet and arrangement is a gesture of storytelling, a visual dialogue that celebrates connection, memory, and emotional resonance.

In recent practice, Tshegofatso has expanded her artistic lens to incorporate curatorial
thinking alongside her hands-on floral work. She reframes her projects as curated series,
pairing flowers with textual reflections, visual objects, and intimate narratives. Through this
approach, her work becomes a living archive, moments and experiences collected, arranged,
and presented to evoke contemplation and affective engagement. This curatorial layer
enriches her practice, inviting viewers to engage not only with beauty but with the layers of meaning, intention, and relationality embedded in each piece.

Writing remains central to Tshegofatso’s work, whether in short texts accompanying floral
arrangements, reflective essays, or curatorial notes. Her words guide audiences through her
creative process, articulating the emotional and cultural significance of her chosen materials
and arrangements. The intersection of flowers, text, and curation embodies a practice
grounded in care, joy, and attentiveness to the nuances of human experience.

Tshegofatso’s work is a love letter to community, to self, and to the moments of tenderness and celebration that define our lives. Through her art, she invites audiences to pause, reflect, and participate in the quiet, transformative power of flowers and stories.

Tshepo Maloba

Tshepo Caesar Maloba is a multidisciplinary artist from Limpopo based in Johannesburg. Ranging from sound to visual to immersive or experiential, their work usually revolves around identity construction and life building – meaning making – as one would put.

Exploring photography, videography, colour grading, creative and artistic direction, Caesars work leans towards editorial and visual aesthetic themes and conventions. One begins to question and quest within fine art photography the idea of an artwork as to a spectacle or entertaining visual piece.

Which brings up the conversation of OPACITY can photography exists without labelling but still the same amount of appreciation and can identity exist without being understood. Johannesburg ties everything together when we look at the invisible attraction that is

“The city/Urban Spaces”.

The city is a physical and metaphysical manifestation of the convergence and connection but also the disidentification of and with the hegemonic and colonial rigid culture that has built constructed an developed the city into the “ESSENCE of LIFE” is possess and embodies

Vhonani T Munyama

Vhonani T Munyama is a Johannesburg based artist and writer.

Her practice,with its roots in literature and writing, works through her own personal experiences as an entry point. Exploring themes of intimacy, love, grief and personhood, she uses her work as a starting point to make sense of the world. While also exploring alternate modes of seeing.

Her current work, When Grief Becomes A Window, is an installation that explores grief and its capacities. The work is twofold as it navigates grieving and the inability to articulate through that grief. In its steps it also contends with disrupted mourning and displacement while unraveling through quiet moments of loss at key moments of her personal histories. This work builds its foundation on, and seeks to question the role the 1913 Native Land Act has had on disrupting burial customs and grief practices within Black South African communities. In its entirety, the work is a consideration of mourning in the capacity of both the body and the land.

She is currently completing her undergraduate degree in Fine Arts at the University of Witwatersrand.

Vivien Kohler

Vivien Kohler was born in Cape Town in 1976, and lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. He received his National Diploma in Fine Art from the Ruth Prowse School of Art and Design, Cape Town, 2000. In 2017 Kohler received the Thami Mnyele Sculpture Merit Award, in 2013 won the Lovell Gallery Artist Competition, and in 2012 won the ItWeb/Brainstorm Competition with an entry commissioned by Vodacom. His work is housed in both private and public collections including the Nando’s Collection, the Hollard Collection, Vodacom Collection, SAB, Fusion UK, UNISA Gallery Collection, Artbank SA, William Humphreys Art Gallery Collection, Freedom Park Collection (PTA) and the Contemporary Art Collection of the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art, based in Geneva, Switzerland

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Kohler has produced 10 solo shows to date:

This too shall come to pass (Gallery MOMO, Johannesburg, 2022), Esteemed Heads III (1XRUN, Detroit, USA, 2022), Esteemed Heads II (1XRUN, Detroit, USA, June 2021), Esteemed Heads (1XRUN, Detroit, USA, January 2021), r3:FORM4re (Gallery MOMO, Johannesburg, 2019),
At the Still Point of the Turning World (Sulger-Buel Lovell Gallery, London, 2018),
Clay Opera (Sulger-Buel Lovell Gallery, London, 2017), Residuum (Ilse Schermers Art Gallery, Franschhoek, 2016), De(re)tritus (Lovell Gallery, Cape Town, 2014), and Given to Fly (Association of Visual Arts, Cape Town, 2012). 

Selected group exhibitions include:

Latitudes Art Fair (Gallery MOMO, 2025)

If you look hard enough, you can see our future (Newcomb Art Museum, Tulane University, New Orleans, USA, 2025)

EXPO Chicago (Chicago, USA, Gallery MOMO, 2025)

“Beyond Boundaries A collective Odyssey” group exhibition (Lisbon Art Week, This Is Not A White Cube Gallery, Cape Verde Cultural Centre, Lisbon, Portugal, 2025)

If you look hard enough, you can see our future (African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta, Atlanta, USA, 2024)

FNB Art Joburg (Gallery MOMO, 2024)

Latitudes Art Fair (Gallery MOMO, 2024)

EXPO Chicago (Chicago, USA, Gallery MOMO, 2024)

“EMBODIED NARRATIVES” group exhibition (Lisbon Art Week, This Is Not A White Cube Gallery, Lisbon, Portugal, 2024

1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair – Spier Arts Trust & Nandos Group exhibition (London, 2023)

“If you look hard enough, you can see our future” group exhibition (African American Museum, Dallas, USA, 2023)

“Regarding Time: Visual Contemplations on Indexicals” group exhibition (MOMO Outskirts, Jhb, SA, 2023)

“(IM)MATERIALITY” group exhibition (This is not a white cube gallery, Agueda’s Art Centre, Lisbon, Portugal, 2022), What connects us (1XRUN, Detroit, USA, 2021)
Nano 2.0 (Barnard, Cape Town, 2018), Is There Still Life? (Old Town House, Cape Town, 2007), Prints on Paper (Klein Karoo Nationale Kunstefees, Outdshoorn, and Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg, 2017), Turbine Art Fair (Johannesburg, 2017), 35 Years: Trailblazers (Lizamore & Associates, Johannesburg, 2017), Between Light and Shadow: Rights of Passage (Sulger-Buel Lovell, Cape Town and London, 2016), Black History Month (Lambeth Academy, London, 2015), Hogan Lovell’s Africa Celebration (London, 2015), and Of(f) Africa
(Sulger-Buel Lovell Gallery, London, 2015). 

Zovuyo Pendu

I have always been interested in the first identity of a human—fascinated by the tension between the embodied element and the intangible essence of being, and by how this tension shapes the autonomy of the individual. These cogitations stem from the persistent observations of my formative years. My art becomes the site where these questions are staged, giving form to what is often concealed, abstract or internal.

My practice investigates the psychological, spiritual and metaphysical aspects of the human condition, often drawing on theology, philosophy and culture as conceptual ground. Through symbolic imagery and layered visual languages, I interrogate questions of faith, identity and perception, translating intangible experiences into material form. Rooted in how I have been shaped by my Christian faith.

My work reinterprets both classical and contemporary traditions, reshaping stylistic and symbolic vocabularies to construct new dialogues between history and the present. The work functions as both a reflection and a provocation: it challenges the predispositions we carry, seeks to unsettle ignorance, and opens a space for deeper awareness of identity as a dynamic and complex phenomenon.

Zovuyo Pendu (b. 2003, Johannesburg) is a South African fine artist working across painting, film and installation, with a primary focus on oil painting. Her practice investigates the psychological, spiritual and metaphysical aspects of the human condition, often using theology, philosophy and culture as conceptual ground. Through symbolic imagery and layered visual languages, she interrogates questions of faith, identity and perception, translating intangible experiences into material form.

Her work draws from both classical and contemporary traditions, reworking stylistic and symbolic vocabularies to construct new dialogues between history and the present. Large-scale canvases, immersive films and installations serve as vehicles for exploring states of conflict, transformation and transcendence, creating spaces that invite contemplation and self-reflection.

Rooted in Johannesburg yet attentive to broader cultural and intellectual currents, Pendu’s practice contributes to the articulation of South African identity within a global discourse. Her work positions art as a site of inquiry into the unseen dimensions of existence, compelling viewers to encounter the complexities of human life in psychological, spiritual and cultural terms.