Buhlebezwe Siwani is the recipient of the Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art 2021 and she joins Mid-Morning Magic’s Yolanda Maartens in the OFM Art Beat to talk about her exhibition Iyeza.

As a multidisciplinary artist, Siwani demonstrates a profound range. Working across embodied performance, installation, video, photography, works on paper, and sculpture, she creates art that is a continued meditation on the intersections of spirituality, indigenous practices, culture, history, and religion, through centering the black female body and lens.

Through a wide range of materials – including soap, wool, and her own body – Siwani’s oeuvre pulses with her belief in the performative possibilities of everything, and demonstrates a vocational practice, unconstrained by mode and medium. Her body of work interrogates the patriarchal framing of the black female body and the black female experience within the South African context.

Negotiating our contemporary reality, iYeza draws on Siwani’s memories, journey, and practice as an initiated traditional healer. Named for the isiXhosa word for (usually plant-derived) medicine, it is also a broader reference to “a substance that is meant to ward off dark spiritual energy” and call in the good.

With iYeza, Siwani interrogates the many forms and uses of plants in “traditional medicines, rituals and daily life”. With reverence, she considers the evolution of their meaning – understood, misunderstood, suppressed by colonial power and still enduring – and how they sustain us.

The exhibition can be viewed until 2 July on the Potchefstroom campus of the NWU.

The virtual exhibition can be viewed here. https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=NAaV7z2ReYt

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