If Not the Word Then the Thought: On Gestures of Suspension and the In-Between with 2026 ANNA Award Winner Mankebe Seakgoe

- by Lindi Mngxitama

If not the word, then the stillness.

Let us linger here awhile.

Jamaica Baldwin

Mankebe Seagkoe, portrait. 

"I think I'm a thought,” says contemporary artist and 2026 ANNA Award winner Mankebe Seakgoe, her words dancing in the space between us and landing with an amused curiosity. A sentence that concludes with an ellipsis rather than with a full stop—an invitation to linger for a while. 

It is a sentence that rearranges the conversation not because it is abstract, but because it insists on another way of knowing the self. To spend time with Seakgoe’s work feels like encountering an intimate poetics of untranslatability in a world fluent in the language of legibility; determined to make us measurable and comprehensible. She offers another proposition: perhaps the self is not first encountered through the body at all. Perhaps it lives elsewhere, in intuition, in feeling, in traces. In a language before language…Her paintings and drawings often appear as fields of gestural marks, a bouquet of fragmented writing layered onto surfaces. Traces that seem to hover in the liminal space between writing and drawing, between utterance and silence, between what can be spoken and what can only be carried.

We have become accustomed to asking artworks to make themselves available to us. We ask what they mean before we ask what they do. We ask them to speak in languages we already know. One’s initial impulse upon encountering Seakgoe’s work might be to decipher it, to search for meaning beneath the marks. However, it is in this pursuit that the preoccupation with understanding thaws, slipping through your fingers, and a realisation sets in that legibility may have never been the point. 

Mankebe Seakgoe, The strange invisibles

When asked how she arrived at art, she laughs slightly before admitting that becoming an artist was never part of the plan."I actually wanted to go into psychology and I thought that I would write secretly on the side,” she says. At the time art felt abstract as a career, psychology practical. It was her mother who suggested she study Fine Art instead, an unexpected intervention in a world where artistic careers are seldom imagined as viable futures, particularly within Black families navigating the practical demands of survival. Looking back, she sees little contradiction between those imagined futures. Art simply became another technology of inquiry, another method of listening. 

Quiet observation and listening became the company Seakgoe kept after her family moved to Midrand as her family shifted from speaking Sepedi to English at home to facilitate adaptation. She found herself suspended between languages, unable to fully express or translate certain forms of understanding. This linguistic displacement profoundly shaped her creative practice. She shares: 

'I think this disrupted the way I process things because we understand things differently depending on the language, and some things can’t be translated. I also feel like words can sometimes lead us astray and that there is a place of understanding that exists without them.'

I think of Mankebe Seakgoe’s studio as a space of tactical affective experiments and of her process as a sort of dance—where charcoal, pastel, wire, and her body become partners in movement. She speaks of sometimes entering a state where authorship becomes ambiguous, where she feels carried by something beyond herself, suspended. 

Within that suspension, the body itself changes function. No longer merely the site through which identity is read or constrained, it becomes an artistic tool no different from charcoal or pigment. One capable of reaching inward and outward simultaneously. This movement beyond bodily containment echoing larger questions around race, gender and visibility. This act of making, as a process of momentarily escaping those limits, gestures not towards disappearance but rather towards expansion.

Mankebe Seakgoe, TheeletÅ¡a / Listen

Sharing her thoughts on Seakgoe’s work, 2026 election committee member and multidisciplinary artist May Sibande—whose own practice is an interrogation on reclaiming the Black femme body from colonial constructions and their lingering legacy—explains that what drew her to Mankebe’s work is how: 

'It takes time for the eye and the brain to adjust to it. It asks you to slow down and spend time with it. I like the combination of wire and stretched canvas and the way the two materials speak to each other.

I was particularly drawn to the way she bends the wire to mimic automatic writing. This language is [found] throughout her works as she sometimes uses charcoal and pastel to create similar gestural marks.'

The ANNA Award recognition feels timely and meaningful precisely because it celebrates the complexity of Seakgoe’s work and how it doesn’t seek to simplify or represent experiences, but instead, expands the possibilities of how experiences can be expressed. Although she is still finding it hard to wrap her mind around being the 2026 ANNA Award recipient, “I actually still can’t believe it”, she expresses over the call; the recognition comes at what feels like a decisive moment in her developing career and practice. The award celebrates women artists from Africa, spotlighting artists whose practice demonstrates both conceptual depth and a distinct voice. 

“This moment feels like a significant milestone in my career and its growth, especially because I’ve only been practising as a full-time artist from the beginning of this year,” Mankebe says. I can’t help but think of material precarity, and the luxury of time and contemplation when I think about women who are artists. As bell hooks wrote in Art on My Mind, “I think often and deeply about women and work, about what it means to have the luxury of time—time spent collecting one’s thoughts, time to work undisturbed.”