Owethu Mtshali

Owethu Mtshali is a Johannesburg-based artist working across sculpture, painting and printmaking. They describe themselves as a Western-assimilated African navigating the recovery and reimagining of their Zulu identity.

Their work builds a repository of Zulu culture, its code, norms and folkways, to bridge the knowledge gaps left by growing up outside the culture's fabric. It takes shape as oil paintings, prints, fabricated cultural artefacts and installations exploring identity, isintu namasiko and reintegration. Central to it is their own upbringing set against the traditional frameworks of ukukhulisa (nurturing), asking what being Zulu looks like, and can look like, today.

Gcina okwakho is a woodcut from Umhlaba onothile, a body of work picturing land in many states: barren, verdant, harvested, stripped, flooded and fenced off. It shows an enclosed field with its sugarcane bundled and ready, but no one around. The print reflects on how the British introduction of sugarcane in the mid-1800s displaced people and reshaped KwaZulu-Natal. History reads as black or white, truth or lies, while our perception forms the grey.

Man In The Arena borrows its title from Theodore Roosevelt: a landscape drained of light, a barren stage with no audience, and an old chair on the hill. Utshani obulele buvuswa umlilo: An Unbecoming sits in a place and time next to it. Drawing on Credo Mutwa's Indaba My Children, it shows icansi, seven fires, impepho and an ukhamba the artist made earlier, a letting go of the ideas that shaped their identity.