By Kemiso Yasmine Wessie 

Mahube Diseko, Thank you for bearing witness exhibition, 2025, Stevenson.

Bryan Adams breathlessly sang, “I wanna be your underwear,” in his playful, propositioning 1996 track. While Adams expressed his desire to be his partner’s panties in private, underwear has moved beyond the bedroom and laundry pile to galleries. Underwear is more than function; it expresses identity, sexuality, memory, and emotion. This intimate garment is just that—intimate. Splashed across canvases, beautified with beads, and turned into sculpture, visual artists Sichumile Adam and Mahube Diseko make these private top-drawer contents everybody’s business and ask us to see them as more than that.Mahube Diseko, You have changed me in ways I will never forget, 2026, ENQUIRE.

We all wear it, but women’s underwear, in particular, is seen as different, enmeshed with meanings not extended to others. An unspoken separation exists between practical and sensual women’s underwear (Longwill, S. 2023), carrying narratives about the wearer that aren’t always honest. Given its proximity to the body and its purpose, it must matter (Tsaousi, C. 2011:4). It isn’t just what’s beneath clothing. It’s like reading someone’s journal, letting you enter a place beyond what they show the outside world.

Tsaousi goes on to say that underwear is 'part of dress as an erotic artefact, as a mundane task and as a consumption practice'. It's like the contents of your handbag or your shopping haul: it tells you a lot about yourself. It helps construct identity and selfhood, and when you show it, the taboos around underwear go away (Adamo, F. 2023).

Mahube Diseko, Remember the first time, 2024, ENQUIRE.

Years later, Malcom X’s May 22nd 1962 statement on Black women in America rings. Black women are expected to shoulder the expectations of their community, of their country, and culture while still being the most disrespected, unprotected, and neglected. A throughline of Black women’s experiences is shame.

In her 2002 book Communion: The Female Search for Love, bell hooks says: “Think of all the women you know who will not allow themselves to be seen without makeup. I often wonder how they feel about themselves at night when they are climbing into bed with intimate partners. Are they overwhelmed with secret shame that someone sees them as they really are? Or do they sleep with rage that who they really are can be celebrated or cared for only in secret?”

Mahube Diseko brings the tension between intimacy, exposure and shame right into the gallery. At FNB Art Joburg in 2023, her work Rage is a Gift did exactly that. It invited the audience not just into Mahube's interior world but into their own. It placed something so personal into the public sphere and asked the viewer to consider what happens when your most intimate self is no longer hidden.

For Diseko, underwear held everything we're taught to keep to ourselves. Its fibres could hold the shame of a lifetime, the things we simply can't speak about. Her practice grew out of a need to give form to personal experiences she was too scared to speak about. She found that underwear was a potent visual medium for expressing intimacy and vulnerability.

Mahube Diseko, Rage is a gift.

“Underwear is something that is considered to be very sacred, very private. But I sensed a bit of shame in being told what to do with underwear,” she adds. By bringing it into her practice, she turns the private into something shared, using the garment as a metaphor for what we conceal, the feelings we carry, and what we are not always ready to tell.

It is an object reserved for the self and a select few, rarely seen beyond the borders of intimacy (though not always sexual). “I wanted people to understand when they approach the work that they are entering a private space that I’m allowing them into, and I think that changes the way they approach the work,” Diseko adds. Her work is reflective, stemming from her constant preoccupation with the human experience, dissecting it and investigating what makes us different from animals; tackling love, rage, grief and healing, expressed in phrases that ground you, hold you and comfort you.

In an age of Meta AI glasses and social media, we've put the most intimate parts of our lives (and, indeed, others') out there for all to see, and we rarely think about the ramifications. Still, real intimacy is rarer than ever. We know a lot about each other, but how well do we actually know ourselves?

Sichumile Adam, Love Me.

Sichumile Adam's work stems from this very contradiction. It's through underwear that she looks at the way women's bodies, their desires and their self-expression are policed even in spaces that should be theirs. "The way we dress is so policed," she says. It's a matter of morality, of respectability and of the constraints that are placed on women, and particularly Black women.

For Adam, underwear is a route back to yourself. It's an act of self-recognition, of "making sense of who I am" (Tsaousi, C 2011) and a private opportunity to explore yourself without an audience. The point isn't that someone else will see you; it's that you'll be comfortable being seen by yourself.

This is of course crucial in a culture which defines female sexuality in terms of what women can give to others (particularly men). Drawing on Audre Lorde's The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, Adam sees sensuality as a source of knowledge, pleasure, and personal power.

"Picking undergarments is a form of self-actualising. You can be a shy girl, but if you see a really pretty thong you can wear that and allow yourself to see how you feel, and that can feel empowering," Adam says in relation to her work Love Me Not. 

Sichumile Adam, Love Me Not.

She talks about the importance of developing intimacy with oneself as the basis for self-trust. That, in turn, enables a woman to move through the world in her own skin, in her own way, in her own terms. “In your own presence you feel comfortable in the way you present yourself in the world,” says Adam.

Shame has long hindered women from imagining other possible futures and has never let them become the person they can take firm ownership of. Adams and Diseko don’t ask Black women to protest and fix the world's problems or their loved ones' problems, but it is still a call to arms, just for yourself. And there is more to celebrate, love, and respect in the one thing nobody can take away: the person you have allowed yourself to be and become outside of and in spite of everyone else.