Cassirer Welz Award Winner Announced

Project Outline.

My practice has always been about making connections between disparate elements, often those concerned with the shifting of equalities and ecology. As ecology is concerned, place and body, and how the two impact each other come into conversation. In my practice, I explore and track how equalities shift in relation to space upon its reconfiguration. Arriving at this using what I call “Immediacies of Encounter” – a mode of work that calls for me to tend to my curiosities beyond the personal, while carrying it along in the process of thinking and making.

Thinking of the domestic as an archive of personal experiences that is triggered upon

encountering ecologies of places I find myself in, and thinking of the domestic as a mobilized= space of public discourse. At present, I have been engaging with histories of forced removals (1955) in Auckland Park, Johannesburg, when it was Sophia Town. The place in which I lived for the past four years (2021-2024) as a student at the University of Johannesburg.

The forced removals affected migrant labourers and their families who had been in the city to deliver hard labour to the white population. Due to the city being deemed “whites only,” these people were moved to the outskirts of the city (Meadowlands, Soweto), not too far for them to deliver or cater to white people’s needs and not inside to disturb the “whites only” rule. This body of work is an attempt to grapple with the question of how to rectify the ‘human hood’ of those who were used as tools of labour during the times of oppression, after they obtained their freedom, and yet still inhabit the very spaces that were constructed to oppress them. All triggering the personal experience of having been raised by parents who work in similar situations of having to leave an outskirt (Gamalakhe Township) to work in the city/town in KZN, Port Shepstone.

Education

2024, BA Hons (Visual Arts) Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture University of Johannesburg.

2023, BA (Visual Arts) Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Johannesburg.

Exhibitions

Solo:

2024: Of Place and the Uncertain curated by Motheo Mamabolo and facilitated by Bag Factory, Constitutional Hill (women’s jail), Johannesburg. South Africa.

Group Exhibitions:

2025: Fractured Foundations: Reimagining Resilience. Guns & Rain Art Gallery, Johannesburg,

2024: AFFECT/EFFECT, UJ FADA Gallery, Johannesburg. South Africa.

2024: Class 2024, RMB Talent Unlocked Mentorship Program, Johannesburg. South Africa.

2024: Gatherers of New Fruit curated by Refiloe Nkomo, Johannesburg. South Africa.

2023: UJ FADA Exhibition, University of Johannesburg APB (FADA Building), Johannesburg.

2023: The Dubious Nature of Cultural Hybridity. Stokvel Gallery. Johannesburg, South Africa.

Residencies/Mentorships and Awards

2025: Ellis house, three-month studio Residency. Johannesburg, South Africa.

2025: 2-week residency at the Kromdraai Impact Hub at Nirox Foundation, South Africa.

2024: Dean’s Choice Award, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at the University of

Johannesburg, South Africa.

2024: RMB Talent Unlocked Mentorship Program and a three-month residency at Bag Factory Artists’ Studios. South Africa.

2023/2024: Bag Factory Young/Unframed, three-month studio residency shared with a curator, Johannesburg. South Africa.