Artworks and Biographies
Zyma Amien is a South African artist based in Cape Town working in the field of conceptual art turning her lens on socio-political issues. In 2015, she completed her MFA Fine Art (Cum Laude) at University of Cape Town.
She completed her Bachelors of Fine Art at the University of South Africa in 2013, receiving the top prize in the country. She was awarded the PPC cement concrete sculptor award in 2012. During 2016 she participated in multiple exhibitions ranging from the Netherlands (Uncover the City), to Sasol Art Museum in Stellenbosch (100 geographies) and Iziko National gallery in Cape Town. She participated in the Ekurhuleni competition and won Sasol New Signatures. Currently, she is participating in the Nirox Sculpture Fair, ‘Athlone in Mind’, as well as working towards the solo exhibition for Sasol. Presently, she is a lecturer at the University of South Africa.
Jane Alexander was born in Johannesburg, and has a BAFA and an MAFA from the University of Witwatersrand. She is known for her life-size sculpted figures featuring human and non-human animal forms presented in installations and tableaux, and photomontage. She has received a number of awards, and her work has been presented on numerous exhibitions in South Africa and internationally.
These include the Havana, Venice, Dakar, Bamako, Sao Paulo and Gwangju Biennales, and independently curated exhibitions: Pep Subirós’ Jane Alexander: Surveys (from the Cape of Good Hope) 2011-2013 and Apartheid: The South African Mirror 2007; Simon Njami’s Divine Comedy 2014-15 and Africa Remix 2004-07; and Okwui Enwezor’s Rise and Fall of Apartheid 2012-2014 and Short Century 2001-02. She has artwork in a number of private and public collections including the South African National Gallery, Maison Européenne de la Photo, Paris; Sindika Dokolo Collection, Luanda; and Tate Modern, London. Alexander is a professor at the University of Cape Town Michaelis School of Fine Art.
Hasan and Husain Essop are twin brothers (born 1985, Cape Town) who currently live and work in Cape Town. They graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at University of Cape Town in 2006 with Bachelors of Fine Art, majoring in Printmaking and Photography respectively, and Postgraduate diplomas in Art in 2009. Recipients of the 2014 Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art, they exhibited their collaborative photographic series Unrest at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum, Standard Bank Gallery, National Arts Festival and Iziko Museum, among other venues in South Africa.
Recent exhibitions include Remembrance at Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2012), Indelible Marks at Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai (2011), Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2011) and Peek-a-boo Current South Africa at Helsinki Art Museum, Finland (2011). Their works are held in several private and public collections such as the Deutsche Bank Collection, Spier Art Collection, Durban Art Gallery and Iziko South African National Gallery.
Kemang Wa Lehulere was born in 1984 in Cape Town, and lives there. He has a BA Fine Arts degree from the University of the Witwatersrand (2011). Solo exhibitions have taken place at the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle (2017); the Art Institute of Chicago (2016); Gasworks, London (2015); Lombard Freid Projects, New York (2013); the Goethe-Institut, Johannesburg (2011), the Association of Visual Arts in Cape Town (2009), and the Stevenson Gallery (2016). Notable group exhibitions include Art/ Afrique, le nouvel atelier at Fondation Louis Vuitton (2017); African Odysseys at Le Brass Cultural Centre of Forest, Belgium (2015); the 8th Berlin Biennale (2014); Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2014); The Ungovernables, the second triennial exhibition of the New Museum in New York (2012); A Terrible Beauty is Born, the 11th Lyon Biennale at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon, France (2011) and When Your Lips Are My Ears, Our Bodies Become Radios at the Kunsthalle Bern and Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland (2010).
Wa Lehulere was the winner of the inaugural Spier Contemporary Award in 2007, the MTN New Contemporaries Award in 2010, and the Tollman Award for the Visual Arts in 2012; he was one of two young artists awarded the 15th Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel in 2013, won the first International Tiberius Art Award Dresden in 2014 and was the Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Arts in 2015. He is Deutsche Bank’s ‘Artist of the Year’ 2017. Wa Lehulere was a co-founder of the Gugulective (2006), an artist-led collective based in Cape Town, and a founding member of the Center for Historical Reenactments in Johannesburg.
Dathini Mzayiya is CHR artist in residence in Visual Arts based at the Factory of the Arts. His previous residency was held at Greatmore studios in Woodstock, Cape Town. Mzayiya was born in Queenstown in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa in 1979. After studying advertising and marketing at the Advertising College of South Africa, Cape Town, in 1999, he enrolled at the Peninsula Technikon (Pentech), Bellville, Cape Town, in 2000, where studied graphic design and advertising. He then registered for the Advanced Programme in Visual Arts at the Community Arts Project (CAP), Cape Town, in 2001. At CAP, he was taught drawing and painting by Joseph Gaylard and Sarah Schneckloth.
Since then, he has shown his work internationally in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Ethiopia, and in South Africa. He has also participated in international projects, including a project for the South African Human Rights Media Centre in Liberia and Kenya, where he worked with survivors of torture and war. Using oil paint and charcoal, Mzayiya’s critical art depicts the socio-political landscape of the postapartheid, with particular focus on racialised structural violence and the plight of the poor and downtrodden. His expressive paintings and drawings generally reflect disillusionment with a contemporary South Africa described by some as the “rainbow nation”, and his subjects range from bosses, landlords, the police and security guards to the homeless, beggars and job seekers.
Mzayiya is a founding member of Western Cape branch of the Visual Arts Network of South Africa (VANSA); Africa South Arts Initiative (ASAI); CitySkin, a public space design firm; and Gugulective, an arts, culture and open education collective intent on making “the history and legacy of apartheid visible again and to combat it with artistic methods.”
Berni Searle is a South African artist working with photography, video, and film to produce lens-based installations. Often, but not exclusively, using herself in her work, she has produced performative works that explore issues of self-representation, the relationship between personal and collective identity and narratives connected to history, memory and place. Her use of metaphor and poetic ambiguity transcend the specificity of context, drawing on universal human emotions associated with displacement, vulnerability and loss.
She has won a number of awards including the Minister of Culture Prize at DAK’ART 2000, Senegal; the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art (South Africa 2003) and she was an Artes Mundi short-listed artist (Cardiff, Wales, 2004). She was the recipient of the Rockefeller Bellagio Creative Arts Fellow Award for 2014 and was the recipient of the Mbokodo Award in 2015. Previous international exhibitions include the 49th Venice Biennale (2001) and the 51st Venice Biennale (2005); Personal Affects, Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (New York, 2004); New Photography at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2007); Figures and Fictions at the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, 2011); Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2011); Earth Matters at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution (Washington DC, USA., 2014) and Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive at the Walther Collection, Ulm, (Germany, 2014-2015) and most recently Embodiments. Women defining the politics of distance at the PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan (Italy 2017). Searle is currently the Director of the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town.