Talia Ramkilawan
b. 1996 - embroidery / mixed media
Ramkilawan studied at Michaelis School of Fine Art, majoring in sculpture, and had a solo exhibition at Smith, Cape Town in 2020. Her experience of her South Asian identity, culture, and trauma is visualised through her adept usage of mixed media. Trauma is unpacked via complex juxtapositions, with the process becoming a kind of meditative healing. “Indian, yet not Indian enough, a daughter, a friend, queer, brown, tired yet with so much more to give.”
Introducing Wanted21: Young and vital artists
A list of talented artists born in the ’90s and producing, in South Africa, work of profound thoughtfulness and import
Banele Khoza
b.1994 - visual art
In 2017 Khoza won the prestigious Gerard Sekoto Award and with it a three-month residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris. He was also named one of the Mail & Guardian 200 Young South Africans. The diversity and relative freedom of South Africa has allowed the Eswatini-born artist to tackle gender norms and experience through his work, which mirrors his life. Khoza’s visual language explores expressions of masculinity through both romance and vulnerability, allowing a complex examination.
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Image: Supplied
Jake Michael Singer
b. 1991 - multi-disciplinary
Singer apprenticed with photographer Aïda Muluneh in the 2018 Kampala Biennale. In 2012 he assisted William Kentridge with his exhibition The Refusal of Time. He was recognised by the Eduardo Villa Foundation Grant in both 2016 and 2017, and in 2020 he launched the Emergence Art Prize with THK Gallery. He has been invited to residencies in Johannes-burg (2014) and Amsterdam (2017). Singer’s artwork is concerned with the materiality and transformation of objects. Emergent techniques are used to create transcendent sculptures, while multiple elements are incorporated to create a single whole, moving from chaos to harmony.
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Image: Supplied
Bonolo Illinois Kavula
b. 1992 mixed media
Kavula received the 2014 Katrine Harries Print Cabinet Award at UCT, and was a finalist in Sasol’s New Signatures (2014). She challenges the conventions of printmaking, and is an advocate of simplicity and minimalism. Her work is experimental and influenced by the Cubist, Dadaist, and Expressionist movements of 1960s conceptual art. Her usage of banal objects to create artworks speaks to her personal connection to her work as well as her experimental side.
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Image: Supplied
Chris Soal
b. 1994 - mixed media /sculpture
Soal was awarded the overall PPC Imaginarium Awards prize in 2018. He has been given residencies by the South African Foundation for Contemporary Art, the RAW Material Company, and Montoro12 Contemporary Art, and is the youngest artist to collaborate with Dior on designing two handbags for the fifth edition of the Lady Dior “art bag”. Soal is concerned with the materiality of ubiquitous objects — toothpicks and bottle caps, in particular — that are essentially engineered to become debris. By using them as his key materials, he provides a structural reflection on urban life and ecological crisis. Through an abstract, minimalist language, Soal challenges societal assumptions, value chains, and history.
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Image: Supplied
Giggs Kgole
b. 1997 - multi-disciplinary
Kgole was mentored by William Kentridge and made the Sasol New Signatures Top 100 at 19. He was awarded a 2019 arts residency in France by Undiscovered Canvas and named one of Mail and Guardian’s Top 200 Young South Africans. He is currently studying at the John Cabot University in Italy, where he was awarded a full scholarship. His work exposes the interplay between rural and urban environments and the identities of their respective inhabitants. These vivid experiences are expressed in a style that is typified by the use of anaglyphs — two composite photographic images that are overlaid, creating an immersive viewing experience.
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Image: Supplied
Kyu Sang Lee
b. 1993 - photography
Sang Lee received the Simon Gerson Prize (2016) for his graduating body of work and the Cecil Skotnes Award for Most Promising Artist at Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town (2014). After graduating in 2016, he won the Celeste Prize for Photography & Digital Graphics (2017) and is currently photographer-in-residence at the Orms Cape Town School of Photography. Working in predominantly black and white, he draws on his diverse experiences of the world, reflecting on traditional notions of religion and belief, which are juxtaposed with the transitional space of identity, architecture, and environment. Dogma is spurned yet its iconography and influence are celebrated.
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Image: Supplied
Sthenjwa Luthuli
b. 1991 - woodcut prints
Luthuli was runner-up in the Sasol New Signatures Art Competition in 2017 and participated in the Velobala mentorship programme hosted by the African Art Centre at the Durban University of Technology. He carves intricate and fluid patterns onto woodblocks, allowing the final print to become a meditative reflection on the “unknown space”. The shape of the circle is emphasised, to contrast with the square and promote boundless and gentle movement. Often his works evoke his Zulu identity, tying his headless figures to rituals and culture.
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Image: Supplied
Malebona Maphutse
b. 1994 - mixed media
Maphutse was awarded the Bag Factory Young Female Artist Residency in 2018. She investigates the politics of space through the historical, physiological, and meta-physical environments of bodies. Contextualising religious syncretism in Johannesburg and South Africa, the colonial frameworks of Christianity, and the demonisation of indigenous beliefs are explored through their crossovers and parallels.
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Image: Supplied
Lerato Lodi
b. 1996 - mixed media
Lodi is currently finishing her MTech (Fine Arts) at the Tshwane University of Technology. She unpacks the polarising ideas of spirituality and religion within an African context. Her work functions as a personal journey in negotiating the stigma often associated with both indigenous spirituality and the political history of Christianity.
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Image: Supplied
Zandile Tshabalala
b. 1999 - visual art
Tshabalala’s figurative works rewrite the narratives of Black women in history. Dark-skinned figures appropriate the exclusive Post-Impressionism paintings, allowing both respect and inclusion for previously marginalised identities. Her experience of being a Black woman — through her perspective, positioning, and representation — is explored, challenged, and celebrated.
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Image: Supplied
Lunga Ntila
b. 1995 - photography / collage
In 2019 Ntila held her debut solo show Ukuzilanda at BKhz. She was also spotlighted at Design Indaba and collaborated with fashion label Artclub and Friends. She uses deconstruction to address themes of identity, bias, and societal narratives. Her experimental and original perspective is expressed in a simultaneously delicate and distorted representation of her subjects, framing and understanding the ideologies that govern identity and society.
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Image: Supplied
Lulama “Wolf” Mlambo
b. 1993 - visual art
Mlambo conceptualises her artwork through mixed media collages, situating it at the intersection of Neo-Expressionism and African art. The contemporary mind is used as a tool to dissect the pre-colonial and postindependence African experience via methods lifted from traditional art and vernacular architecture. She prides herself on translating experience through time and space to science and technique, discovering the world’s contradictions in the process.
Image: Supplied
Image: Supplied
Talia Ramkilawan
b. 1996 - embroidery / mixed media
Ramkilawan studied at Michaelis School of Fine Art, majoring in sculpture, and had a solo exhibition at Smith, Cape Town in 2020. Her experience of her South Asian identity, culture, and trauma is visualised through her adept usage of mixed media. Trauma is unpacked via complex juxtapositions, with the process becoming a kind of meditative healing. “Indian, yet not Indian enough, a daughter, a friend, queer, brown, tired yet with so much more to give.”
Image: Supplied
Image: Supplied
Simphiwe Ndzube
b. 1990 - multi-disciplinary
Ndzube had residencies at Dalton Warehouse in Los Angeles (2018) and Greatmore Artist Residency Studios in Cape Town (2016). He is the recipient of the Culture Creators “Innovators & Leaders” Award in Art (2019), the Tollman Award for the Visual Arts (2016), the Michaelis Prize (2015), the Simon Gerson Prize (2015), and the Cecil Skotnes Scholarship (2013) at UCT. He amalgamates objects, media, and surfaces to form an interplay, creating a mythological perspective on Black identity and experience. Using the themes of history and magic realism, his work explores the boundaries of society, embracing contradictory realities and the diversity of perception while rewriting dialogues and rewiring prejudices.
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Daniel Malan
b. 1991 - mixed media
Malan was awarded a design internship with Kim Jones at Louis Vuitton Menswear in 2016. He interprets the world around him through his art. A global outlook has made him experiment and express how the internet contracts both time and place. “I love having the ability to document that I was present in time. I think artists often strive to accomplish this, and it is one of the ways art can be appreciated. It’s a joy to document the present world.”
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Image: Supplied
Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose
b. 1994 - multi-disciplinary
Nyawose is a member of UCT’s Works of Art Committee, which is responsible for the curation and acquisition of the university’s art collection, and the 2019 recipient of the Andrew Mellon Graduate Internship at Iziko South African National Gallery. He is a Creative Knowledge Resources ostgraduate Fellow (2019-2020) and Institute of Creative Arts Fellow (2020). Through a de-colonial framework, Nyawose develops research about Africa and the diaspora’s cultural production. Recently, his eBhish exhibition investigated the invisibility of Black leisure in public places and mainstream discourse, contributing to a contemporary photographic archive of Black life.
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Image: Supplied
Lwando Dlamini
b. 1992 - visual art
Dlamini took part in the RMB talent-unlocked programme, received the 2018 David Koloane Award from the Bag Factory Artists’ Studios, and attended the Artists’ Career Boot Camp. He deals with physiological and psychological trauma in a period of global reckoning with police violence and gender-based violence. Faceless, violated impasto bodies contradict the seemingly joyful mood of his paintings. Rather than taking refuge in a blasé stance or denying their trauma, these figures are instead reconciling and gaining strength.
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Image: Supplied
Luyanda Zindela
b. 1991 - visual art
Zindela is the winner of the Absa L’Atelier Merit Award in 2014 and the runner-up in the 2019 Sasol New Signatures, as well as a fellow of the Ampersand Foundation’s artist-inresidency programme in New York in 2015. Social commentary plays a key role in his work. He centres his pieces around navigating the world and his lived experiences. The expression of these issues and intricacies are an essential aspect of his craft.
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Alice Mann
b. 1991 – photography
Mann is a winner of the LensCulture Emerging Photographer prize (2018), and the PHMuseum Women’s New Generation prize (2018). She also took first place at the prestigious Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize (2018) and received the Grand Prix at the 34th edition of the Hyères International Festival of Fashion and Photography (2019). Her intimate photographic portraits are often undertaken over an extended period of time, allowing for engaged collaboration and a nuanced representation to empower her subjects.
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Image: Supplied
Cinthia Sifa Mulanga
b. 1997 - mixed media
In 2019 Mulanga was awarded first place for a work created for a tribute exhibition to Louis Khela Maqhubela and Douglas Portway, presented by Artist Proof Studio and Strauss & Co at the Turbine Art Fair. She is finishing her third year at Artist Proof Studio, where she is combining intaglio and silk-screening techniques in her unpacking of African and female identity. Her current work engages with the politics of beauty and the domestic space within an Afropolitan context.
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Image: Supplied
Dada Khanyisa
b. 1991 - multi-disciplinary
Khanyisa won the Simon Gerson Prize in 2016. As a merit winner at the SA Taxi Art Foundation Awards in 2015, their work featured on 10 taxis traversing the roads of South Africa. They participated in a Fountainhead Residency in Miami in 2018. Through their multi-disciplinary work they share things that “make me feel good”, such as social progress, nonsexual intimacy, the normalisation of gender fluidity, and communication.
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Image: Supplied
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