The Wanted Young and Vital Artists 2024

Tshepiso Moropa - mixed media

Moropa is a multidisciplinary artist who works in photography, collage, and beyond. Her work is characterised by the use of complicated forms, bold ornamentation, archival imagery, and the juxtaposition of materials. She explores the connection between contemporary counterparts and our forgotten ancestors. She holds a BA in Psychology and Linguistics from the University of the Witwatersrand.

Chuma Adam – mixed media

Adam is a multidisciplinary artist exploring painting, printmaking, textiles, sculpture, and drawing. She makes work that straddles portraiture, figuration, and abstraction, drawing on Édouard Glissant and his theory on opacity. Adam graduated with a BA Hons in Fine Arts from Wits (2024) and was shortlisted for the Wits Young Artist Award (2022, 2023).

Ditiro Mashigo - textile

Mashigo creates art that straddles the world of fashion, textile design, and fine arts, drawing inspiration from traditional SePedi culture and contemporary Christian experience. In 2014, she established her fashion brand, Serati. She is a Design Indaba alumnus, was the curator of the 2022 Emerging Creatives programme, and studied Fashion and Textile Design at Tshwane University of Technology.

Thando Phenyane – mixed media

Phenyane is a figurative painter with a wide pool of influences. Trained as an architect, his process draws heavily on art history and pop culture, employing a unique painterly language that presents Black figures as dark, whimsical characters, at once comical and menacing. He took part in the 2021 Design Indaba Emerging Creatives programme and the 2021 V&A Waterfront Artist Alliance Programme.  

Kay’Leigh Fisher – mixed media

Fisher makes compelling figurative work that explores themes of identity, growth, and relationships. By bringing together painting and drawing, her multidisciplinary work mines connections between race and gender in today’s society, offering a personal perspective on our shared socio-political reality. Fisher holds an Honours in Curatorship from Michaelis School of Fine Art and a BA in Fine Arts from Wits.

Inga Somdyala - interdisciplinary

Somdyala is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores personal aspects of the cultural, political, and social negotiations of the post-apartheid generation in primarily painting, print media, and installation. He completed an MFA (2019) at Michaelis School of Fine Art and is the 2022 recipient of the MTN New Contemporaries Award. He completed a residency at Nirox Foundation in February 2023.

Nosiviwe Matikinca - sculpture

Matikinca is sculptor and ceramicist who draws on her experiences growing up in Hermanus, with her evocative works mining the stories of mythologised children for their symbolic power, harnessing their fragility and resilience. Her installation of broken school shoes won her the 2023 Sasol New Signatures Art Competition. She is a BA Visual Arts student at Nelson Mandela University. Her Sasol New Signatures solo exhibition, Ukungalingani Kwezemfundo (Educational Inequality) is on at the Pretoria Arts Museum until November 5.  

Jana Visser - textile

Visser uses textile and handweaving, grounding her practice in an openness to uncertainty while considering and surrendering to the delicate relationships between matter, time, and space. Her work has been exhibited in multiple galleries and institutions in both South Africa and Belgium. Visser completed her BA in Fine Art at Stellenbosch University. She was one of 12 finalists for the 2024 ANNA Award.

Hanna Noor Mahomed - painting

Mahomed is a Cape Town-based artist who explores the ideas of freedom, renewal, and production within the context of her subjective lived experience and the broader Islamic world. Her painterly language is at once playful and critical, and references the relationship between objects and meaning using reanimated objects. She graduated from the Cape Town Creative Academy with a BA in Contemporary Art in 2019.

Sahlah Davids - mixed media

Davids uses textiles, upholstery, and needlework to explore the oral histories of her heritage in religiosity and socio-political themes. She describes her creative methods as the product of the blended learning and trades of the Cape Muslim experience. Her formal language draws on the skills of her lineage, the history of their struggles and, ultimately, the embodiment of their spirituality. She has an MA in Urban Design.

Tebogo Losaba – photography

Losaba’s photography revolves around themes of social realism. Largely self-taught, he produces portraits and street documentary, drawing much of his inspiration from street scenes. His work has been featured in various exhibitions and competitions, including the Thami Mnyele Fine Arts Awards, TAF Paper (Turbine Art Fair), RMB Latitudes Art Fair, and Sasol New Signatures (Expression Unbound).

Feni Chulumanco - painting

Chulumanco is a figurative painter whose compelling canvases draw their power from his own personal journey, presenting what he calls “depleted” human figures encased in glass boxes — a device he uses to highlight ideas of individualism. He hopes to take the viewer on a visual journey, allowing them to reflect on their own identity. He has benefitted from the mentorship of various established artists at Greatmore Studios and elsewhere.

Terence Maluleke - painting

Maluleke is a multidisciplinary artist with an idiosyncratic figurative language. His artistic voice draws on the visual grammar of comic books, illustration, and contemporary painting. Maluleke is one of the founders of Kasi Sketchbook — a project that aims to create drawing clubs in townships. He has worked with Walt Disney Animation Studios, Sony Pictures Animation, Netflix, and Triggerfish Animation.

Mikhailia Petersen - photography

Petersen has a background in commercial and fashion photography and styling, with a strong portraiture focus. Her work seeks to subvert the way people of colour and LGBTQIA+ are lensed through hardship and oppression. She has exhibited locally at The Reservoir, THK Gallery, Ebony Gallery, and AVA Gallery; internationally at the V&A Museum X Guap x We Are Soul show in London; and worked on a Puma campaign.

Ntsako Nkuna - mixed media

Nkuna is an interdisciplinary artist who works with screenprinted 3D renders and metallic frames reminiscent of architectural borders in residential spaces. Her work aims to uncover the extent to which architectural structures can shape ideas of being by orienting human interaction within environments. She was awarded the Wits Fine Arts NewWork23 Prize.

Sibusiso Bheka - photography  

Bheka lives in Thokoza, to the east of Joburg. His photographic work documents his environment by night, exploring a unique view of Thokoza just before the light disappears. His series “Stop Nonsense” was part of the Rencontres de Bamako – African Biennale of Photography in 2017, while his work was also shown at the Ghent International Festival, Rencontres d’Arles, and Bristol Photo Festival.

Bontle Tau - mixed media

Tau, a visual artist, writer, and curator, is a polyglot who finds her primary focus in issues concerning cultural identity, codeswitching, and assimilation. In 2020, she held a curatorial internship at the Southern African Foundation for Contemporary Art in SaintÉmilion, France. Tau obtained her BA in Fine Arts in 2018 at the University of the Free State and is currently completing her MA in Fine Arts there.

Songezo Zantsi - mixed media

Zantsi makes figurative work that celebrates traditional cultures and rural scenes. He has worked in the design industry for two years and started his solo career in 2019. In 2019 he joined the Association for Visual Arts Gallery on its installation-crew training programme. Zantsi’s work draws inspiration from rituals, customs, and traditions, questioning what he sees as the loss of progressive values of pre-colonial identity.

Simphiwe Buthelezi - mixed media

Buthelezi’s artistic practice unfolds with a process of journeying, path-making, and truth-seeking. Her multidisciplinary work is composed of a variety of materials: icansi (reed mats), glass beads, tankrali (Zulu seed beads), sea sand, seashells, metal, and canvas. She was awarded the Blessing Ngobeni Art Prize in 2018. In 2023, she exhibited at Paris+ par Art Basel and the Investec Cape Town Art Fair.

Samantha Maseko - printmaking

Maseko is a printmaker based in Joburg, where she trained at Artist Proof Studio. Her work studies the racial experience of Black people from the perspective of Black women through representations of the female form, its desirability, and sometimes problematically sexualised body, or the politics of Black hair, race, and colourism.

Yolanda Mazwana - painting

Mazwana explores themes of mental illness, popular culture, phobias, relationships, and storytelling in her painting, employing fantastic forms and the expressive use of gesture and colour. Her solo exhibition “Symptoms of Nothing” at Kalashnikovv Gallery (2019) explored such experiences and scenarios re-imagined as characters. In 2019, she received the Bag Factory Young Womxn Studio Bursary.

 Xanthe Scout Lardner-Burke - painting

Lardner-Burke is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice is process-based, using chance and willed accident as key points of creative departure. She’s interested in precarity, structures, language, and value production. Scout Lardner-Burke graduated from Michaelis School of Fine Art (2021) and most recently exhibited with 99 Loop Gallery at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair

Anna van der Ploeg - mixed media

Van der Ploeg works in various media, though her professional practice is primarily in painting, printmaking, and sculpture. She has an interest in language and her work draws on literary terms and ideas of representational imagery. She has held several solo exhibitions locally and internationally, and has participated in artist-in-residence programmes in Japan, India, and France.

Masindi Nafisa Mbolekwa - painting

Mbolekwa explores human figures and other forms, testing binaries and the ways in which they shape our understanding of boundaries, otherness, cultural identity, and metaphysical reality. He draws inspiration and source material from religious iconography and popular media. He holds a BA Hons in Fine Arts from Wits.