Khanya Mthethwa

Lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa

Artist statement

My practice is rooted in jewellery, Indigenous Knowledge and the ways objects carry histories that are not always preserved through written archives. I work across jewellery, photography, installation and research to explore how cultural knowledge survives, changes and continues through the body, material objects, memory and adornment. I am interested in what happens when Indigenous histories have been fragmented, displaced or interpreted through colonial systems of documentation. Rather than treating the archive as the only place from which these histories can be recovered, I turn to people, practices, dress, language, oral knowledge and objects as living archives. Jewellery becomes particularly important within this process because objects can continue to carry knowledge even when the meanings surrounding them have shifted or become difficult to trace. My work often begins with research and develops through making, styling and photography. I use my own body within these images as a site through which histories can be reimagined rather than simply reproduced. This allows me to move between researcher, maker and subject while questioning who has historically been given the authority to represent African people and their material cultures. Across projects such as Abantu: Threads That Bind Us, Echoes of the Past and Adorned Memory, I consider making as a way of thinking through cultural continuity. I am not attempting to reconstruct the past exactly as it was. Instead, my...

Artwork