In a newly opened Milan space on Via Gustavo Modena, Buhlebezwe Siwani presents uYana Umhlaba, her first solo exhibition in Italy.
Running from March 27 to May 30 with Consonni Radziszewski, the exhibition brings together a new body of work that extends concerns first articulated in her Inkanyamba series, initially shown at the Galeria Municipal de Almada in 2020.
The title, uYana Umhlaba — translated as “it is raining earth” or “tears of the earth” — gestures towards a landscape that is material and symbolic. Across a series of mixed media paintings, Siwani constructs terrains that feel unsettled and alive. Shifts in tone, layered textures and fluid, abstract forms evoke a natural world shaped by memory, where boundaries appear provisional rather than fixed.
That sense of instability is rooted in the artist’s early life in South Africa. Born in Joburg in 1987 and raised partly in Soweto, Siwani grew up within the spatial constraints of apartheid, where land and movement were governed by policies such as the Group Areas Act.
Her surroundings, marked by migrant labour systems and the residue of gold mining, continue to inform her work. Landscapes here are not passive backdrops but sites where histories of extraction, displacement and division remain embedded.
Textiles form the structural basis of many of the works. Fabrics associated with traditional dress are cut, layered and stitched together, creating surfaces that resemble maps and scar tissue.
These seams hold the compositions in tension, suggesting borders that are at once enforced and unstable. Within them, Siwani introduces materials that carry personal and cultural weight. Gold pigment recalls the mineral wealth of the Witwatersrand, while resin introduces a liquid dimension, evoking water as a life source and a spiritual conduit.
A recurring and more unexpected element is Sunlight soap, a familiar presence in many South African households. Recast within the work, it shifts from an everyday cleaning agent to something more enduring. Embedded into the surface, it speaks to rituals of purification while opening a broader inquiry into the politics of the body.
Siwani draws connections between cleanliness and gender, between the regulation of black bodies and the imposition of Christian doctrines through practices such as baptism. In this context, the act of washing becomes intimate and ideological, tied to questions of power, belief and historical accountability.
Working across performance, photography, sculpture and installation, Siwani’s practice is grounded in ritual. As an initiated sangoma, her work engages directly with the relationship between Christianity and African spirituality, often using her own body as subject and medium. This layering of roles, as object, image and site, informs the material and conceptual density of uYana Umhlaba, where personal experience and collective histories remain closely intertwined.
Now living between Cape Town and Amsterdam, her distance from South Africa has sharpened this engagement. The exhibition arrives amid increasing international recognition.
In 2021, she was awarded the Standard Bank Young Artist Award, and her work has since been presented at institutions including Zeitz MOCAA, Kunstinstituut Melly and Tate Modern.
She is also among the artists invited by the former executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz MOCAA, Koyo Kouoh, to participate in In Minor Keys, the 61st edition of La Biennale di Venezia, opening in May.
• uYana Umhlaba is on show at Consonni Radziszewski in Milan until May 30.
