THE Durban Art Gallery opened it doors to a group of KwaZulu-Natal based artists to showcase art work that explores our African-ness and what defines us as Africans.
This group exhibition explores the identity of five respective artists, it exposes their truths, cultural and religious beliefs. Each piece brings you into the artist’s world and gives you a deeper understanding of what it means to be an African through their eyes.
The exhibition features, Memorial Sikhumbuziso Agatha Mnguni-Biyela who works as a sculptor and a ceramicist. She says the woman she knows well is herself. “I understand other women through myself, hence most of my sculptures address women issues. One of my sculptures titled I feel what you fee’ depicts women holding a secret meeting and sharing their fates. I often depict women in various moods and situations. Women share a lot of experiences mostly based on gender issues and domestic violence,” she said.
Mgwago Enock Mabika says his work has always told a story, stories of fallen kings and queens, of struggle, pain, perseverance and manhood because “that’s the culture I grew up in. All my pieces interlink with one another portraying my version of the stories I was told by my father growing up.”
Angelina Bonisiwe Masuku who pays tribute to her grandmother said: “My art is my tribute to my late grandmother, a strong woman who taught me how to weave my first basket at the tender age of 8 years.”
Zakhele Mkhawuleni Hlabisa whose art is mostly portraits and a few landscapes said: “The theme: I am an African has rocked my core. I grew up under the thick blanket of apartheid and the ever so changing leadership of th ANC. Mama Winnie was a huge inspiration, a wife just like my mother whose husband had gone away to fight for the freedom and identification of a nation. But unlike Winnie my mother was just a house wife who did what she could for us to get by, hence I included two of her portraits in my work,” he said.
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