Yonela Makoba (b. 1993, Eastern Cape, South Africa) is a transdisciplinary artist, cultural worker, and researcher working across performance, installation, photography, printmaking, and text. Rooted in Indigenous knowledge systems, their practice moves through memory, ritual, and the knowledge carried by black bodies.
Drawing on autoethnography, Indigenous knowledge, Pan-Africanism, and Black feminist thought, Makoba works with movement, fabric, natural materials, and voice to explore the relationality between spirits, people, and things. Guided by the Xhosa axiom uhamba kubona (to go is to see), and what they term ukulu(o)ngu(o)za, their work embraces wandering and phenomenology as methodologies for coming into knowledge (ancestral and otherwise), and for intuitively composing rituals, gatherings, and happenings for the present.
Central to their practice is iTi, a Xhosa ritual of remembering matriarchal ancestors, which they have been critically and intuitively fabulating through an ongoing series titled iTi Ritual Studies.
These iterations experiment with holding space for multiple permutations of the ritual, exploring its shifts, silences, and possibilities across time and space. Through this work, Makoba is
developing a language and practice for creating and holding ritual space in various media. Makoba holds a Master’s degree in Theatre and Performance and a BSc in Environmental and Geographic Science from the University of Cape Town. Their work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions, performances, and art fairs, including the recent solo presentation Rooi-land (Red-land) at Suidoosterfees at Artscape in early 2026, and the group exhibition I Keep Coming
Back, I Don’t Know Why at Stevenson Gallery. Makoba will be featured in Iziko Museums’ Materiality V2, opening late August 2026, and in the 15th edition of the Rencontres de Bamako nov 2026-jan 2027.
Yonela Makoba (b. 1993, Eastern Cape, South Africa) is a transdisciplinary artist, cultural worker, and researcher working across performance, installation, photography, printmaking, and text. Rooted in Indigenous knowledge systems, their practice moves through memory, ritual, and the knowledge carried by black bodies.
Drawing on autoethnography, Indigenous knowledge, Pan-Africanism, and Black feminist thought, Makoba works with movement, fabric, natural materials, and voice to explore the relationality between spirits, people, and things. Guided by the Xhosa axiom uhamba kubona (to go is to see), and what they term ukulu(o)ngu(o)za, their work embraces wandering and phenomenology as methodologies for coming into knowledge (ancestral and otherwise), and for intuitively composing rituals, gatherings, and happenings for the present.
Central to their practice is iTi, a Xhosa ritual of remembering matriarchal ancestors, which they have been critically and intuitively fabulating through an ongoing series titled iTi Ritual Studies.
These iterations experiment with holding space for multiple permutations of the ritual, exploring its shifts, silences, and possibilities across time and space. Through this work, Makoba is
developing a language and practice for creating and holding ritual space in various media. Makoba holds a Master’s degree in Theatre and Performance and a BSc in Environmental and Geographic Science from the University of Cape Town. Their work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions, performances, and art fairs, including the recent solo presentation Rooi-land (Red-land) at Suidoosterfees at Artscape in early 2026, and the group exhibition I Keep Coming
Back, I Don’t Know Why at Stevenson Gallery. Makoba will be featured in Iziko Museums’ Materiality V2, opening late August 2026, and in the 15th edition of the Rencontres de Bamako nov 2026-jan 2027.
