In his forthcoming exhibition at Constitution Hill, Setlamorago Mashilo (Mash) turns his attention to a figure both ancient and urgently contemporary: the shepherd.
Opening on February 12 inside the former women’s prison at Constitution Hill, Modiši wa go botega extends the artist’s long-standing engagement with land, migration and belonging, but reframes these concerns through the lens of stewardship. The Sepedi title translates to a reliable shepherd or good steward, a phrase that carries moral weight in a country still negotiating the aftershocks of dispossession and fractured leadership.
For Mash, who grew up in rural Limpopo, the shepherd is not a metaphor alone. It is a lived memory and a structuring device. “This body of work is about responsibility and what happens in its absence,” the artist explains. “I am reflecting on stewardship, on leadership rooted in care and on the consequences when those figures are lost or silenced within our communities.”
The exhibition gathers bronze sculpture, painting and collage into a tightly considered body of work that reads less as disparate objects and more as a spatial narrative. Mash’s bronzes, weighted and figurative, assert a physical permanence. His paintings operate differently, their surfaces layered and atmospheric, while collage introduces rupture and reassembly. Together, they create a vocabulary through which ideas of care, authority and erosion are materially negotiated.
“Materiality is central to how the story is told,” says Mash. “Bronze holds permanence and weight, painting allows for memory and emotion to surface and collage reflects fragmentation, how histories and identities are assembled and reassembled over time.”
This sensitivity to material has defined Mash’s international practice. Having exhibited widely in South Africa, London and across Europe, he has consistently returned to questions of home and contested terrain. Earlier works examined interior spaces and domestic architectures as sites of both psychological refuge and political tension. In Modiši wa go botega those concerns remain, but the focus sharpens. Leadership, loss and continuity move to the foreground.
“I see this exhibition as a continuation rather than a break,” he notes. “Land, movement and identity are not only local concerns. They are global conversations. What changes here is the urgency and the way the narrative is carried through form, scale and material.”
The choice of Constitution Hill is not incidental. The former prison, now a site associated with constitutional rights and public memory, operates as more than a backdrop. Its walls hold histories of confinement and resistance, complicating any neutral reading of space. Within this charged architecture, Mash’s exploration of ethical leadership gains resonance.
“This space gives the work permission to speak honestly,” he says. “It allows these narratives to be tested against the histories that live in these walls.”
Modiši wa go botega opens on February 12 at Constitution Hill, Johannesburg.
