Thamsanqa Kiti
Thamsanqa 'Thami' Eddie Kiti was born in 1968 in Machabini, a village near Queenstown in the Eastern Cape. He has lived in Khayelitsha since his early youth.
In the late 1980s and 90s, Thamsanqa Kiti attended Community Arts Project (CAP) at St Philips in Woodstock, and took classes in carving, drawing, painting and print making under Mario Sickle, Lucy Alexander, Lionel Davis, Lovell Friedman and Sipho Hlati.
Working mainly as a carver, Thamsanqa Kiti has had his work included on various exhibitions including: ‘Thami Kiti and Wanini Hill’ at the UCT Irma Stern Museum in 1995; ‘Engaging the Shadows’, Robben Island, 1997; ‘Homecoming’, Gug’Sthebe, Langa, 2001; ‘Against the Grain’, 2013, Iziko South African National Gallery curated by Mario Pissarra; ‘my whole body changed into something else’, Stevenson gallery, 2021 curated by Sisipho Ngodwana and Sinazo Chiya; and ‘Seeds of the Fig’ an exhibition curated by RESERVOIR in collaboration with Whatiftheworld for Krone in Tulbagh, 2023. He participated in the Thapong International Artists Workshop in Gaborone in 1996 as well as a number of workshops in Cape Town and Pretoria. Thamsanqa Kiti worked for the Handspring Puppet Company from 2008-2011, and has produced a number of his own unique articulated and puppet animals. In 2017, he was the winner of the Craft Award for his carved initiation staffs for the Innibos Laeveld Nasionale Kunstefees in Mbombela. He was commissioned to create a large temporary public sculpture, a mosaic hybrid figure of a bride, Umakhoti, for an outdoor exhibition, ‘Reflections’, in Stellenbosch in 2015; a staff with a leopard, Ingwe Izidla Ngamabala, for the UCT Vice-Chancellor’s annual Award for Transformation in 2019; and a carved broom with a bird as part of Jane Alexander’s installation Infirmary, 2014, 2019. He has artwork in the Robben Island Collection, the collection of William Humphreys Art Gallery in Kimberley, the Community Arts Project Collection at the University of the Western Cape, and numerous private collections.
Thamsanqa Kiti’s works make direct reference to Xhosa culture, particularly birth, initiation, marriage and death in relation to the earth. They sometimes combine hybrid forms, particularly human and goat features, and other animals that hold cultural significance such as Inqaqa (civet) and Inganda (serval). His most recent work includes carved and decorated staffs with mounted animal figures that often refer to initiation, and individual animals composed of multiple types of wood, some with elaborate inlay.
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