PRESS RELEASE
KEABETSWE SEEMA: Let the fire lead you home - WINNER OF THE BLESSING NGOBENI ART PRIZE
Oct 1 – Oct 23, 2024
The Blessing Ngobeni Art Prize, in collaboration with Everard Read is pleased to present Keabetswe Seema’s first solo exhibition, Let the fire lead you home.
Opening reception: Tuesday 1st October - 6pm
Walkabout: Saturday 5th October - 11am
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Exhibition Statement: Written by Zaza Hlatswayo
It began with a recurring dream. In it, a border of fire acted as an enclosure without engulfing its witness. From this came the instructing body of work let the fire lead you home.
Winner of the 2024 Blessing Ngobeni Art Prize, Keabetswe Seema is an interdisciplinary artist with a practice that is as concerned with resolution as it is with projection.
In the exhibition following the award, Seema says “home is an unknown place in dreamscape that is calling out to me.” In the socio-political/ abstract worlds she occupies, Seema is yet to find a home because, “the place I exist in is not safe or free for a soul like mine and those I represent.”
A means to find the feeling felt within the fiery enclosure, the body of work uses fantasy to present an outwardly promise land. More than an escapist moment of hope, Seema says the work questions the importance of imagination, fantasy and eluding reality while femme and black.
On making in her capacity as the recently awarded, Blessing Ngobeni Art Prize recipient, which involved a three-month residency, Seema describes the process as free from the cerebral and spatial limits of her own studio. “I let my mind think wider. I was able to work on multiple things at the same time and create connections between them organically.”
An intervention setting the foundation for research, her practice interrogates the function and impact of an internal/ personal spiritual experience while participating in a secular, socio-communal world. But before the research comes the language. “I wondered how I could align holiness to blackness,” explains the artist. Toward the vernacular, Seema’s current intervention involves the collection of insights from several schools of thought including Afro-surrealism, spirituality, semiotics, aristocracy, womanhood and popular culture.
Central to her visual language, Seema says collage gives her freedom and fluidity necessary for depicting black femmehood. Building from the belief that “we exist as fragments”, Seema cuts, pastes, tears, contorts and gathers fragments for contrasting realities in a bid to offer the fabulations required to sufficiently demonstrate what the artist refers to as a renaissance of black femmehood.
A thorough thread running through her practice, a major part of Seema’s vernacular involves the deliberate inclusion of characters who bare a likeness to her. “It is not only to insert/ assert myself but my mother and grandmother as well because we look so alike… my story is essentially a result of the paths they walked,” explains the artist before she adds; “By referring to the self, I get to reimagine a history or claim an unknown future.” Existing beyond temporal limits, in addition to acknowledging the past and being active about the present, the work subverts patriarchal standards by taking ownership of femme futures. “It almost acts as a form of self-preservation,” she adds.
BLESSING NGOBENI ART PRIZE
The Blessing Ngobeni Art Prize is an award that is aimed at assisting young and emerging visual artists to launch their careers in the art industry. The award acknowledges excellence in emerging artists (under 35) specializing in sculpture, drawing, and painting, or mixed media and provides an opportunity to showcase their talents to a broader audience. Now in its eighth year, The Blessing Ngobeni Art Prize (BNAP) has established itself as a community-based organization collaborating with industry leaders such as Everard Read Gallery, Art Angels, DALRO, JSE, Goodman Gallery, The Melrose Gallery, MMArtHouse, Aspire Art Auctions, Bag Factory Studios, Infra-Afrika Advisory, Ellis House Art Building, Nyko Enterprise, Boschendal and Art Lefatshe Fine Art consultancy and the development agency.
BNAP Foundation is an NPO that aims to address the needs of emerging artists to be able to sustain themselves in the art industry through residencies.
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KEABETSWE SEEMA
(b.1999, Johannesburg, South Africa)
Keabetswe Seema explores themes of Afro Surrealism, Afrofuturism and the politics of the black female body through monotype printmaking, photography, collage, and sound installation. She interrogates the agentic becoming of the black female figure, by lending her practice to fantasy and augmented worlds where infinite modes of being write their own story. Her work reveals an assembly of layered processes that centre around joining fragments to a new type of whole.
Seema sources materials from a mixture of origins- family archives, newspaper clippings, and magazine cut-outs are decontextualised through the surgical practice of cutting, tearing, moving and mending. The consistent process of destruction and reconstruction of images of the black female body and her environment is aimed at destroying a set of hierarchies. Here the body is constantly changing. Seema inserts her own body into fantasy worlds where landscapes ooze absurdity and playfulness, revealing the infinite possibilities of multiple selves.
The repetition of Seema’s body, her limbs or parts of her face, illustrates the process of navigating confrontational spaces. The body as invested in its own theorisation unveils the unexpected ways of looking towards new worlds where the black female figure channels multiple representations of selfhood, femininity, sexuality, spirituality and beauty.
Seema considers the fragmented racialised and gendered self in history and contemporary society, by interrogating the effect of Apartheid and colonisation through her interpersonal relationships with her mother and grandmother. Seema investigates the complexity of the black female experience in South Africa through the stories of the women that came before her. Through imagery of female family members, Seema unveils fragments of the past, full of contradictions, guiding the viewer towards a more nuanced understanding of the future.
The beings depicted in her artworks are multifaceted and fluid, inviting the viewer to enter into a world of mystery and ambiguity, and serving as vessels for a renaissance of black femininity.
Seema began her studies at the University of Pretoria in Political Science, later transitioning to a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Seema won the Blessing Ngobeni Art Prize in 2024. Keabetswe Seema was born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa.
