Khanyi Mawhayi
Khanyi Mawhayi (b. 1998) is an artist and curator based in Cape Town, South Africa. She is developing a formal language across media, tackling themes such as decoloniality and world-building. Mawhayi’s work is concerned with self-location and identity formation, exploring how abstraction can be used to achieve the right to opacity.
Through her artistic and curatorial practice, Mawhayi looks for ways in which society can reimagine normalized structures and systems by acknowledging individual and shared desires and encouraging fabulation and imagination.
She makes drawings, paintings, non-narrative videos, and tapestries and considers materiality and form, especially colour, not only on an aesthetic level but also on a conceptual basis. Drawing from art history, popular culture, and personal experience, she sees her wider practice as a reflection on her mission to comfortably exist within multiplicities. Mawhayi holds a BFA from Wits University (‘20) and has held three solo exhibition's in Cape Town, most recently Black and White Paradise at Vela Projects. Her work has been shown in the Kampala Biennale (‘20), the Zozimo Bulbul Black Film Festival (‘22) and What We Know at Keys Art Mile (‘22). She is currently a curatorial assistant at Zeitz MOCAA
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