Sethembile Msezane
Sethembile Msezane b.. 1991 in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. She lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.
She was awarded a Masters in Fine Arts in 2017 from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. Using interdisciplinary practice encompassing photography, painting, live works/embodiments, film, sculpture and installation.
Msezane creates commanding works heavy with spiritual and political symbolism. The artist explores issues around spirituality, commemoration and African knowledge systems. She processes her dreams as a medium through a lens of the plurality of existence across space and time, asking questions about the remembrance of ancestry. Part of her work has examined the processes of mythmaking which are used to construct history, calling attention to the absence of the black female body in both the narratives and physical spaces of historical commemoration.
Msezane participated in the 14th edition of PhotoIreland, she has participated in the13th Bamako Encounters African Biennale of Photography (2022), she completed a residency at Central Saint Martins, London (2022), she participated in the 14th Dak’art Biennale (2022), she was a UEA Global Talent Fellow hosted by the Sainsbury Research Unit and Sainsbury Centre (2021). She was Mellon Artist Residency Fellow in partnership with Gallery of the University of Stellenbosch and the English Department (2020), she is a National Institute for Human Social Sciences Award nominee (2020), OkayAfrica 100 women 2018 Honoree. Msezane was a TEDGlobal Speaker in Arusha, Tanzania (2017). Msezane is the first recipient of the Rising Light award at the Mbokodo Awards (2016).
Msezane’s work has been widely exhibited across South Africa and internationally and was included in various exhibitions and museums that include the Zeitz MOCAA (Cape Town), as well as that of the Iziko South African National Gallery (Cape Town), The Royal Ontario Museum (Canada), Oscar Niemeyer Museum (Brazil) and more.
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