Makaziwe Radebe

VIRTUAL TOUR

ARTIST CATALOGUE

Umsinga Ongunaphakade

“The very concept of black power is informed with Soul, so on the deepest levels of meaning it implies a kind of society which is radically different from the one we now live in. It implies, to use Lerone Bennet's words again, a life geared to the Spirit rather than the letter, a relaxed and non-competitive approach to being, a complex acceptance of the contradictions of life.” 

In working with ruin and remedy, and with forms that hold multiplicity, my practice orbits the entanglements of memory, language, and spiritual residue. 

My works are memory antennae: fragile but charged structures that extend into time, drawing signals from history, ancestry, and the yet-to-come. Umsinga, rendered here as the current, functions as both image and operative logic for this work. Etymologically and metaphorically, a current denotes flow, circulation, accretion, and directional movement: it pulls, deposits, and returns; it carries silt as surely as it carries song. As a method, umsinga privileges continuance over closure, rhythm over linearity, and relation over isolated presence. It names an archival poetics in which fragments are not assembled into a single verdict but threaded into ongoing circuits of attention and re-performance. Towers, as the vertical grammar of the work, offer a vantage, layering, and the means to hold accumulation, where the current enacts procession and temporal circulation. The tower provides scaffolding for orientation: stacked panels, tensile columns, and ascending arrays act as rooms of reflection, staircases of refrain, and windows onto layered time.

Positioning my practice as a site of inquiry: The resulting constellation is neither an archive as mausoleum nor a spectacle as consumption; it is an ecology of relation that stages memory as movement. Rehearsal for spiritual revolution, a visual essay on Black ontology, and a confrontation with historical silence. It becomes not just a visual experience but a temporal and mnemonic device, a living archive of what was, what remains, and what might yet emerge.