[imagesource: Justin Keene]

The South African art scene is not without its controversies, from the ‘boy’s club’ that has taken up space for decades, to the inequalities and lack of diversity in art schools, it’s a contentious space.

So, when phenomenal artists like Teresa Kutala Firmino and Blessing Ngobeni emerge, to fearlessly take on our socio-political reality, the world takes notice.

Ngobeni has earned acclaim for his massive politically charged canvases. He won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for the Visual Arts in 2020 and has shown at galleries including Everard Read in South Africa and Jenkins Johnson in Chicago.

Kutala Firmino, who is part of the art collective Kutala Chopeto, but also works as a solo artist, will exhibit her first London show, Manifestation Oku Yongola, at Everard Read this month.

Via The Financial Times: Firmino explains that “Oku Yongola comes from the Umbundu language, an Angolan language: it means wanting”.

“For me, to make a statement of wanting – as a woman – is beautiful. It is beautiful for me to say that I want something, not because I need it, not because it is for service, not because I am a mum, or a daughter or a wife, but just me, a human being… women are not supposed to want. You are supposed to wait to be given something.”

Her mixed media art combines paint and collage, with images sourced from magazines, newspapers, photographs, and social media.

She was born in Pomfret, in the North West Province, to a Congolese father and an Angolan mother, and grew up in a community of former 32 Battalion soldiers and their families.

Many were of Angolan heritage and had settled there following the South African Border Way that took place between 1966 and 1990.

She was accepted into an art program at Wits, where she says that she struggled at first.

“I was a laughing stock because everyone came from the technical school where they’d learnt how to draw portraits and landscapes, and I just couldn’t.”

She started finding her métier when the emphasis became conceptual, and she moved into performance art and using oral narratives: “Suddenly you become a storyteller. And so I started telling my family history and then African history, and from then, I became one of the top students.”

Ngobeni met Firmino during her studies. He had already established himself as an artist, and urged her to move from performance art to painting.

Ngobeni’s work, according to Nataal, addresses oppression both physical and psychological.

“I paint the things affecting me and my people; the things causing problems around the development of our young minds,” Ngobeni says. “I look to events like when the Europeans came to steal our resources, which were supposed to serve and give food to our own people. But mostly it’s current affairs and things that matter to us right now.”

“where the capitalist wants everything from the masses, the energy that they drain from the people through the cycle of work and exploitation. The oppressive mentality from the Western world which people must submit to is what I work with.”

Together they make a formidable team, likely to keep rising to new heights.

[source:financialtimes&nataal]