Sethembile Msezane

Day 2: Unlocking History and New Narratives

Perspective 7 - 12 November 2022.

Abstract

The Seed is a Memory of the Fruit

Sethembile Msezane is part of a generation of youth that draws on traditional and spiritual teachings from her culture in creating ‘living’ and ‘ephemeral’ contemporary art that often challenges the idea of permanence in museum practice.

Her work questions how we can use ecologies of nature as a metaphor in rethinking permanence and impermanence in the preservation of knowledge. Just as the seed recognizes its origin is within the fruit, preserving knowledge also means sustaining communities.

Msezane recognizes elders as keepers of time and memory in our communities, asking that we consider them as living libraries.

The colonial project of excavating and harvesting without benefitting its source cannot continue to exist. If the museum is to remain relevant and truly archive our histories, ongoing connections to communities need to be established and maintained. In so doing, museum practice will not only benefit from the expertise of living libraries, but they will contribute to these elders remaining purposeful to younger generations in their communities, thereby investing in the cross-pollination between generations in re-imagining the future.

Biography

Sethembile Msezane is an artist who uses performance, photography, film, sculpture and drawing to create works that address spiritual and political symbolism, and African knowledge systems. Drawing on her dreams, she asks questions about ancestral memory and the processes by which mythmaking is used to construct history, highlighting the absence of the black female body in both the narratives and physical spaces of historical commemoration.

She recently participated in the 14th Dak’art Biennale (2022), and previously has been a UEA Global Talent Fellow hosted by the Sainsbury Research Unit and Sainsbury Centre (2021), a Mellon Artist Residency Fellow in partnership with the University of Stellenbosch (2020), and a OkayAfrica 100 women 2018 Honoree. She was a TEDGlobal Speaker in Ausha, Tanzania (2017), a TAF & Sylt Emerging Artist Residency Award winner (2016), and was the first recipient of the Rising Light award at the Mbokodo Awards (2016). Sethembile Msezane (b. 1991) lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.