artists-from-south-africa

"The fact is that I am self-expressing. I make work that is about me and my place in the world. I can’t always get stuck in the thinking that some people think it’s controversial or react in ways that say it’s controversial"

"The thing about being queer is that you are constantly becoming It’s a very active identity because being queer is not about who you are but what you do"

"I am really inspired by what is happening on campuses, it’s the reason I am here. People are demanding more and they are demanding what they deserve. I wouldn’t want to be an artist anywhere else"

"Most of my work is about understanding what violence and power do to people and how people strive to dignity. We can choose to ignore what is happening around us or we can choose to get involved, I would rather be active than inactive. My idea is to shift that white people are oppressed"

"I am an artist concerned primarily with contemporary socio-political narratives. I am interested in portraiture as co-authorship; social media as narrative; technology as self-reflection and provocation. I am Genderqueer, which is a non-binary transgender identity and my work deals with issues around the gaze, whiteness, capital, body politics, queer identities and radical love. I ask you to address me with gender neutral pronouns They, Them, Their."

"I have made images and told stories of people in a multitude of mediums, including photography and video documentary for the past 20 years. More recently I have been extending my art practice in ways that shares those experiences in ever more creative ways, through exhibitions, interventions, installations and performances with an aim to providing a lens for social justice. I have worked and collaborated with visual and performing artists, theatre-makers, filmmakers, dancers and audiences to make work that engages beyond aesthetics. The work democratises the creative process, because it helps people develop a language to articulate their conditions and provide a platform to express their imagination."

"Being queer is being political, it is a political identity for me even more that a gender ultimately"

"All of these right-wing parties keep trying to prove that there is reverse racism happening and that’s a complete fairy tale. Reverse racism can only exist if you get into a time machine, go back and do to white people what white people did to black people for hundreds of years"

"After growing up black in white South Africa, internalising so many negative 'truths' of what black people are like, I needed to reclaim my humanity and myself from the toxic dance of objectification."

"Writing contains the writer, their concerns, their social context and their history. My own history became a block to my creativity as I started to explore my identity as a black woman adopted by a white family in apartheid South Africa."

"As a mixed-race African and adoptee I feel, paradoxically, oppressed and completely free....My adult life has been largely devoted to healing this rift. The freedom of my paradoxical position, is in fact that I don't have the constraints of a traditional role and I have access to the world."

"I felt like the colonised and the coloniser were fighting each other inside my brain. Writing continued to be important to me but I was convinced that it was simply a therapeutic process, of no value to anyone else."

""I started writing poetry when I was a child, my first published poem was when I was 11. I was brought up in a home that loved poetry and literature, especially the English language. But it was only when I was older that I realised that writing is so much more than words playing on a page."

"Because I wasn't told that I was adopted until I was twenty, I lacked a vocabulary to describe who I am and where I come from, so performing and writing became ways to make myself up."

"I became Phillippa Yaa when I found my biological father, who told me that if he had been there when I was born, the first name I'd have been given would be a day name like all Ghanaian babies, and all Thursday girls are Yaa, Yawo, or Yaya. So by changing my name I intended to inscribe a feeling of belonging and also one of pride on my African side."

"The fragile and ephemeral process of candle smoke Victor felt was an appropriate medium for the portraits of the primates rendered fragile and impermanent by mankind."

"The technique of using ash as a drawing medium developed from printmaking. Texture and tone in etching is produced when rosin dust is sprinkled onto an etching plate to create an aquatint."

"Victor made another series of large smoke drawings of farm animals on glass called "Brief Lives", which were displayed in an abandoned abattoir. The glass drawings deal with the loss of body and identity and the nature of the smoke speaks of the transience of life."

"It's difficult to talk about Southwood's work without talking about the artist herself because she so unashamedly bares herself, warts-and-all, to an audience. Plumbing the depths of her conservative, white, middle-class Afrikaans upbringing, Southwood unearths a nasty cycle of repression, abuse and the coping mechanisms offered her by this society where women occupy a silent and haunted interior. Southwood's candidness about her own disposition leaves a viewer trapped between doubting her sincerity and wanting to know less about a near stranger. 'Too close for comfort', her first one person show, held in 2000, presented the viewer with this dilemma in an all too attractive way."

"Monroe strikes me as being the quintessential symptom of modern society; displaced, alienated, capable of (and required to) taking on a range of personae without a basis in the understanding of self and agency. On another level, her story is also the iconic intersection of celebrity, causality and death, not to mention conspiracy. For someone whose identity is inextricably tied to her image and nothing more, it seemed right to recast her with a host of screen characters that more accurately reflected on her private experiences rather than her public persona."

"The portraits are made with the deposits of carbon from candle smoke on white paper. They are exceedingly fragile and can be easily damaged, disintegrating with physical contact as the carbon soot is dislodged from the paper. She was interested in the extremely fragile nature of these human lives and of all human life, attempting to translate this fragility into portraits made from a medium as impermanent as smoke itself."

"Victor's smoke portraits explore subjects often overlooked, for example South African prisoners awaiting trial and missing children. These portraits capture individuals caught in a vulnerable moment, an idea reinforced through the impermanent nature of the medium used."

"Shopping and clothing is part of my family’s culture. If something is wrong, you go buy a dress."

"The images I am working with are taken from our daily media coverage of recent and almost commonplace happenings in newspapers, on TV and on radio of social and criminal acts of violence and ongoing unnecessary deaths – occurrences so frequent that they no longer raise an outcry from our public, yet they still constitute disaster in peacetime."

"Working with films in this way was very interesting, considering that they were originally shot on film, processed and printed, and now transferred onto VHS or digitized onto DVD for home consumption. This process underwent a curious inversion in this work, as I photographed countless frames off my laptop screen as the DVD played."

""Living, Forgiving, Remembering | Museum Arnhem." www.museumarnhem.nl. Retrieved 27 March 2025."

"Watching films is no longer an exclusively public experience in cinemas. With the kinds of technologies available today, I am able to indulge my interests in capturing what lies beyond the between frames in films at my leisure, in my private space. These 'autopsied' images seem to give rise to other hidden, secret narratives when characters are caught in freeze-frame, or in the background, apparently unnoticed when not taking centre stage."

"If these were the works universally exalted across America’s art museums, if these were the images filling the heads of American children over generations, what would America’s conversations about race, gender and sexuality sound like today?"

"You are born here, and yet you can’t speak one vernacular language is an issue for me. You’ve had the chance, I mean you are surrounded by people, are you telling me that as a white person you are honestly not going to make that effort. I know how to speak English, I wasn’t born around people who speak English, and I was born around people who speak isiXhosa, isiZulu. Yet I know how to speak seSotho, which is totally different from my own language, and you are telling me it’s difficult to speak one. So I’m just not buying it. I’m not interested. I title my work in a language that resonates with the work. It is also to exclude, because I know you can’t speak it, and I know that most of the audience coming in need a translation, which forces you to engage with the work even further. So it’s also a conscious decision – it might be a bad strategy, but at this point in time I don’t really care – I’m going to continue doing it.""

"Well you know, sometimes I get so irritated with audiences, especially male audiences who will say stupid things like “that’s a nice ass” or something like that. For me, I think as long as the performer knows exactly what the intention is with the body everybody will get over everything else. There are some people who just don’t get it, and that’s ok too. I know what my body is loaded with. I know what it is and I know how to use it. I know I’ve gotten to the point where I know how it works. I don’t necessarily care anymore."

""The simplest thing, I could literally just have an exhibition by putting this bowl down. For me, that would be enough. But for some people they’ve always got to go extra, extra, extra. I don’t feel the same way."

"I'm in the world. Artists are in the world . . . My role is to get artists’ work out into the world, and excite people about it [while] being respectful [and] finding artists people won’t be familiar with."

"The first performance I did at the Theater Spektakel was basically around reparations, how we take back the land, and I used the student protests as the starting point. I started with video pieces of these different camps for Boere (Afrikaans) guys who run the camp because they think black people are going to invade and kill them all, and then I move on to the student protests, and after that I go to the land matter. It’s also about how the female black body is viewed in protests, how black women have protested certain things, and how they are kept out of protest history. If women must protest they must protest not to make a mark, you know, it’s not like you can be a part of the ANC and be there with Mandela."

"I don’t think so, I think there are really strong individuals and people will be surprised when we show individually. The thing is, they don’t give people a chance. That’s the main problem."

"Through the themes of the body, sexuality, self-representation, motherhood, beliefs, the exhibition questions how the question of intimacy in black women reveals unspoken words and manifests their relationship to the world. It offers a reflection where the notions of memory, family, spirituality and imagination are intertwined. The creations presented - painting, pottery, photography, video, performance, embroidery etc. - celebrate the emancipatory energy of the "power of their hands"."

"Reconciliation is needed more than ever. We see Black Lives Matter demonstrations throughout the world, calling attention to inequality, racism and senseless violence. Inflammatory language on social media and even in politics serves to increase social polarisation. All too often, the world is shocked by extreme acts of violence prompted by prejudice against those of a certain religion, ethnicity, sexuality or gender identity."

"I have been preoccupied with 'forensic' methods of observation and perception for many years. Much of my work requires viewers to take on the persona of a kind of detective, deconstructing and unravelling clues and references that may not announce themselves outright. These clues are invested in the subject matter and iconography I employ but also live firmly in the media in which I choose to work."

"When working through ideas, I don't draw; I make collages. These can be visual, or more often they take the form of bits of conversations, observations and sampled words from pretty much anywhere. For this series, we decided to experiment with exposing photo-based images onto polymer plates, effecting a photogravure process, but combining this with a photolitho process."

"The printmaking process for me is all about seriality - the ability to reproduce, copy, and repeat systematically. I like to think of it as a kind of failed forgery; failed as there really was no 'original' to begin with, just the possibility of many of the same."

"If I had something I always wanted something else, I’m just that sort of person."

"She works in a wide variety of media in her artwork, producing sculptures, objects, prints, film, and more, which she often bases on personal experiences and self exploration."

"Her candidness regarding personal flaws and the cycles of repression and coping that accompany conservative, middle class, Afrikaans upbringing inform much of her work, calling attention to ways in which women are silenced or otherwise repressed in that space."

""The art is practiced almost entirely by women, likely passed down when girls became adolescents. Esther couldn’t wait. (She was born an artist),”"

"“Since being a young child, Esther had a will to paint,”"

"“Esther is the person who has taken the local art of design and painting in the Ndebela region and [brought] it to a global context,”"

"Mahlangu follows a local tradition through which this particular type of painting technique is handed down in the family, communicated, learned and transmitted only by women (in the past)"

"Her works are in major private collections including that of The Contemporary African Art Collection (CAAC) of Jean Pigozzi and in many Western museums. Despite being an internationally recognized artist, Esther Mahlangu still presently lives in her village in close and constant contact with her culture."

"Esther Mahlangu has worked tirelessly exposing and developing her talent travelling around the world, and she is very passionate about sharing her knowledge with the younger generation so that she leaves a legacy that lives on for generations to come."

"“She has spanned the horizon of both painting locally and painting globally.”"

"“As children grow up today, they’re losing their culture. I don’t want my culture to die. That’s why I teach children Ndebele art. They must know their culture and where they come from.”"