2026 Students

Otashia Reddy grew up on the outskirts of Cape Town. Through the influence of their mother, they developed an obsessive interest in all facets of history. Their time spent visiting local museums and art galleries instilled within them a passion for history and the way fragments of information are weaved into narrative.

They completed their BA in Fine Art at UCT Michaelis school of Fine Art in 2025. Their artistic practice is grounded in their interest in sustainability and the Anthropocene. By the end of 2025 their work had become primarily concerned with reuse and reformulating the ways in which we currently conceptualize waste/ excess/ by-product. To this end, they experimented with exhausted photochemistry in order to investigate the potential uses of the material beyond its initial purpose.

They are interested in curatorial practice that is both accessible as well as accommodating to people from different backgrounds, levels of education, languages and physical ability. This perspective is in response to what they perceive to be a practice of exclusion or inaccessibility within both the museum and gallery space. They collect rocks in order to remember, and their cat means more to them than life.

Sinovuyo Patiwe hails from the windy city of Port Elizabeth (now Gqeberha) in the Eastern Cape and completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Stellenbosch with Visual Studies as a major. Sino’s interest in visual culture led her to the Michaelis School of Fine Art where she is currently a curatorial fellow pursuing a BA Hons in Curatorship degree.

Her research interests lie in the politics of display and the ways in which exhibition-making mediates the relationships between objects, institutions and the audience. Working through feminist and decolonial frameworks, her thinking is particularly informed by feminist new materialism, an approach to attending to the agency of objects, bodies, and environment.  Through this lens, she is interested in how curatorial practice can challenge inherited modes of representation, foreground marginalised narratives and critically engage with the colonial legacies that are embedded within museum and gallery spaces.

Mars Hesseling was born and raised in Cape Town. They completed a BA in Fine Art at UCT in 2025, specialising in photography.

Through their undergraduate degree they became fascinated with continuous curation as a praxis that informs the art-making process and delved into ideas of layering and obscuring images to form relationships between different subject matters. They focused largely on themes of dissonance, queerness and constructions of the body. 

This year, through their Honours degree in Curatorship they plan to investigate these themes further, delving into the shifting dynamics between public and private. They are particularly interested in the role of the voyeur in how meaning is made and the politics of body shame. Broadly their curatorial focus is how narratives are constructed and packaged for the consumption of the public.

Asante Cele is a South African of IsiZulu descent. She grew up in the Outer West of Durban and moved to Cape Town for her studies at the University of Cape Town. She recently completed her Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History and History. She is a creative individual with a passion for visual arts, particularly in photography. She is currently a postgraduate student in Curatorship at Michaelis.

Her interest in this degree is to be a positive and inspiring presence in gathering, organising, and accurately presenting people’s artworks in a fair manner. She loves to focus on uplifting narratives that showcase diverse perspectives creating a welcoming, inclusive atmosphere. 

Asante’s interest is to deal with a complex issue that lies at the intersection of ethics, public access, education, and cultural responsibilities. Her research focuses on dealing with troubling collections like colonial artworks produced within the framework of imperial and colonial systems. She wants to explore issues related to their preservation, ethical display and the complexities involved in decontextualising these works. These works often reflect the power structures, ideologies, and cultural attitudes of their time. Thus, highlighting historical asymmetries and ongoing debates about repatriation and cultural restitution.