Ukhona Ntsali Mlandu

Lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa

Artist statement

Site-specific work, public art and installations enable Ukhona Ntsali Mlandu to engage with the built environment and/or the often colonial architecture and/or a segregated spatial planning the world has inherited from the colonial project which has recurring characteristics and specificity that are unique to each context. Her point of departure is influenced by her postionality as a radical, inter-sectional, black, queer feminist and mother who was born and grew up in rural South Africa and moved to segregated and racialised Cape Town during her teens. Mlandu dares black bodies (her own and that of collaborators) to exist in such spaces in a dignified aesthetic, claiming space alongside, against and in conversation with signifiers of colonial conquest. In a time when de -colonising the post-colonial is in the collective imagination, she considers the ways in which certain conversations of redress have to be taken to the arena in a way that demands confrontation with beauty and irony. This a deliberate tempering withe the making of the archive which ties in with greater discourse around representation in curricula, mass media and every sector of society. It is examining ways in which the dominant narrative can be subverted by using moments to curate counter-narrative and alternative ways of existing in contested spaces. This also is a way of liberating the politics of imagination and re-imagination. This is seen her body of work #100AfricanReads which is a series of public...

Artwork