The Blessing Ngobeni Art Prize ( BNAP) Foundation is set to host its public solo exhibition opening of 2024, with an exhibition showcasing the works of the winner of the 2024 Blessing Ngobeni Art Prize, Keabetswe Seema, titled: “Let the Fire Lead you Home.”
The exhibition opens at the Everard Read CIRCA gallery in Cape Town on Tuesday, October 1, at 6pm.
Seema, an interdisciplinary artist with a practice that is as concerned with resolution as it is with projection reveals that the exhibition began with a “recurring dream in which a border of fire acted as an enclosure without engulfing its witness”.
On the exhibition, Seema says that “home is an unknown place in dreamscape that is calling out to me.”
On the socio-political/ abstract worlds she occupies, Seema says she is yet to find a home because, “the place I exist in is not safe or free for a soul like mine and those I represent. A means to find the feeling felt within the fiery enclosure, the body of work uses fantasy to present an outwardly promised land.”
More than an escapist moment of hope, Seema says the work questions the importance of imagination, fantasy and eluding reality while (remaining) femme and black.
As the recently awarded Blessing Ngobeni Art Prize recipient, which involved a three-month residency, Seema describes the process as “free from the cerebral and spatial limits” of her own studio.
“I let my mind think wider. I was able to work on multiple things at the same time and create connections between them organically.”
An intervention setting the foundation for research, her practice interrogates the function and impact of an internal/ personal spiritual experience while participating in a secular, socio-communal world. But before the research comes the language. “I wondered how I could align holiness to blackness,” explains the artist.
Palesa Suthane, BNAP Foundation senior curator, says central to her visual language, Seema’s collage gives her the freedom and fluidity necessary for depicting black femmehood.
Building from the belief that “we exist as fragments, Seema cuts, pastes, tears, contorts and gathers fragments for contrasting realities in a bid to offer the fabulations required to sufficiently demonstrate what the artist refers to as a renaissance of black femmehood,“ Suthane says.
The Star