KOOP Projects, Brighton, UK @ Photo London 2024 - Senzeni Marasela, Maheder Haileselassie, Yassmin Forte, Tshepiso Moropa - Discovery Section

KOOP Projects, Brighton, UK 

Photo London 2024 - Discovery Section

Senzeni Marasela, Maheder Haileselassie, Yassmin Forte, Tshepiso Moropa

Somerset House, London

16 - 19 May 2024

At Photo London 2024, Koop Projects presents four female African artists from South African, Ethiopia and Mozambique. Each artist is engaged with telling stories of Africa and Africans told by Africans. Themes in the work are of myth, migration, family, folklore, memory geography and history (real and imagined) and the work includes photography, collage, textile and a short form moving image / animation

SENZENI MARASELA

Theodorah Comes To Johannesburg 

Courtesy the artist and Koop Projects

SENZENI MARASELA

Last Known Location, 2023

Courtesy the artist and Koop Projects

SENZENI MARASELA is one of Africa’s most significant female artists working today, known for her ongoing, narrative, project Waiting For Gebane, which she began in 2003. At Photo London 2024, KOOP Projects will be showing early photographic work (not exhibited for many years) alongside more recent textiles. Senzeni Marasela describes her large scale works as “monuments” to the woman at the centre of Waiting for Gebane, and, by extension, other black women. She is interested in stories that remain unheard and untold of women who came before her and who will come after. The work is grand in scope and vision and can be read as a history of women, and the family unit in South Africa and the history of the city of Johannesburg in the African context. In 2023 Senzeni Marasela became the inaugural recipient of the K21 prize from the Friends of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen. The K21 Global Art Award nomination jury was made up of five renowned curators from around the world: Doryun Chong (M+, Hong Kong), Koyo Kouoh (Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town), Omar Kholeif (Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE), Oluremi C. Onabanjo (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), and Jochen Volz (Pinacoteca doEstado de São Paulo, Brazil). 

Senzeni Marasela’s work is the entrance/doorway to the other African women whose work Koop Projects exhibits.

@senzenimarasela

MAHEDER HAILESELASSIE

Exploration I

Courtesy the artist and Koop Projects

MAHEDER HAILESELASSIE

Town of Adwa

Courtesy the artist and Koop Projects

MAHEDER HAILESELASSIE was one of five artists to win the CAP (Contemporary African Photography) prize in 2023. She has also been shortlisted for Grand Prix Images Vevey 2023/24 and a Phmuseum grant. Maheder Haileselassie works at the intersection of photography, history, anthropology and architecture. Koo Projects showing images from Between Yesterday And Tomorrow, a series of landscape images and portraits inspired by the history books owned by her father. Maheder  Haileselassie has superimposed 19th archives with her current photography and family albums.

@maheder_haileselassie

YASSMIN FORTE 

Military, 2022

Courtesy the artist and Koop Projects

YASSMIN FORTE was also a winner of CAP in 2023. Koop Projects shows photographs from her series: This Is A Story About My Family. In this body of work she addresses her family, migration, colonization and the repetition of patterns of history. She uses collage (archival images and her own new work) to create layers of the past and present, maps connecting her family’s history with the landscapes and history of Mozambique.

@yassminforte_photos

TSHEPISO MOROPA is a self-taught collage artist whose work weaves threads of history, symbolism and imagination. She creates hand-crafted collages and short animated films from archival imagery and her own photography, exploring the past and present tense of black people, the African diaspora and historical archives. The moving image works are translations of African folklore tales, presented as parables and allegories. Koop Projects shows several new and older collage works and animations.

@Tshepisomoropa

KOOP PROJECTS

93 St George's Road, Brighton, BN2 1EE

www.koopprojects.com

PHOTO LONDON 2024

photolondon.org

Senzeni Marasela @ Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town - Waiting for Gebane

Senzeni Marasela

Waiting for Gebane

Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA), Cape Town

Through 2 May 2021

Zeitz MOCAA presents a long-due institutional focus on the work of SENZENI MARSALA.  

Senzeni Marasela, who was born in Thokoza, South Africa, is an artist whose mediums include photography, video, prints, textiles and embroidery. Her work deals with history, memory, and personal narrative, and emphasises historical gaps and overlooked female figures. 

Titled Waiting for Gebane, the exhibition is an overview of the artist’s practice, and centres around Theodorah Mthetyane, Senzeni Marasela’s fictional alter ego who was inspired by, and is a femage to her mother. 

Theodorah’s story begins when her husband, Gebane, leaves her behind in a village in the Eastern Cape when he sets off to work in faraway Johannesburg. After many years of waiting, Theodorah leaves the village for the sprawling city streets to look for her partner. In a series of photographs and textile works, Marasela wears her mother’s yellow ishweshwe dress to depict Theodorah’s search for Gebane while simultaneously honouring her mother. 

In a later performance of the character that blurs the lines between performativity and everyday life, Marasela wore for six consecutive years exclusively the same red ishweshwe dress. Through Theodorah, the artist sought to explore the conditions of waiting and the stories of black women in South Africa, to make visible their subjectivities.  

In speaking about the performance, Senzeni Marasela says: “The idea of having multiple dresses throughout my performance work for Waiting for Gebane, was about an attempt to live or to walk in many shoes. Shoes that were sometimes smaller than mine, bigger than mine, wider than mine.  

“But it was an attempt to multiply this experience, this heavy experience of being a black woman on the continent. And when I do re-enact, I re-enact with the aim of changing, of altering, changing until I find a comfortable position to be in as an artist, as a person.” 

Koyo Kouoh, Executive Director and Chief Curator at Zeitz MOCAA says: “It is an important moment for us at Zeitz MOCAA to celebrate this artist, in presenting her first museum solo exhibition. That it is a first, is almost unfathomable – Marasela has been working consistently and steadfastly on one of the most compelling bodies of work on the African continent by a female artist. 

“What fascinates me about Marasela’s work is that it addresses and carries out, by way of re-enactments, a characteristic feature of contemporary life in Africa: waiting. She adds complexity to the act of waiting and translates it into an affecting visual language that is charged with political and historical gravity.”  

ABOUT SENZENI MARSALA

Born in 1977 in Thokoza, South Africa, Senzeni Marasela is a cross-disciplinary artist who explores photography, video, prints, and mixed-medium installations involving textiles and embroidery.

Her work deals with history, memory, and personal narrative, emphasising historical gaps and overlooked figures. She graduated from the University of Witswatersrand, Johannesburg, in 1998, and shortly thereafter completed a residency at the South African National Gallery, culminating in her work for the Gallery’s Fresh exhibition series.

Her work has been widely exhibited in South Africa, Europe and the US. Senzeni Marasela’s art features in prominent local and international collections, including MoMA, New York. She was recently part of the 56th Johannesburg Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2015). Solo exhibitions include: Waiting for Gebane: Dolly Parton (2018) Toffee Gallery, Darling, South Africa, Sarah, Theodorah and Senzeni in Johannesburg (2011) Art on Paper, Johannesburg, Beyond Booty: Covering Sarah Baartman and other Tales (2010) Axis Gallery, New York, “Oh my God you look like shit. Who let you out of the house looking like that?”, a solo performance, Sternersen Museum, Oslo, JONGA – Look at Me! A Museum of Women, Dolls and Memories, Devon Arts residency, Devon, Three Women, Three Voices (2004) Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, Fresh (2000) South African National Gallery, Cape Town.

Senzeni Marasela’s practice has been contextualised in the following publications, Jonga: Look at Me: Museum of Women, Dolls and Memories (2009), Unbounded (2009), South African Art Now (2009), Darkroom (2009), 10 Years, 100 Artists (2005), History After Apartheid (2003), FRESH (2001).

She lives and works in Soweto, South Africa.

Curators: Koyo Kouoh, Storm Janse Van Rensburg, Tammy Langtry

ZEITZ MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART AFRICA - ZEITZ MOCAA

Silo District, South Arm Road, V&A Waterfront, Cape Town 8002

zeitzmocaa.museum

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