The Blessing Ngobeni Foundation in partnership DALRO hosted a group exhibition at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange featuring their top eight (8) finalists, where Keabetswe Seema was announced as the 2024 Blessing Ngobeni Art Prize Winner and Tshepo Bopape was announced as the first recipient of the new DALRO Visual Art Merit Award.
Keabetswe Seema is a Johannesburg based visual artist who obtained a BA Fine Arts degree from the University of Pretoria. Keabetswe’s practice revolves around the politics of the body and identity, exploring themes of afro-futurism, non-monolithic selfhood, family archives, spirituality, and the hyper visible body. “My works welcome its audience into an alternative universe where playful experimentation meets thought-provoking social commentary, it invites you to journey with me through mystery, absurdity and brilliance that seamlessly blends African futures and the profound. I intend to fuse found stories both familiar and unfamiliar to me and create whimsical spaces that present both the complexities of black female figuration with dreams and confrontation.”- Keabetswe Seema
Tshepo Bopape is a Multidisciplinary artist, based in Johannesburg. Tshepo completed a foundation course in photography at the Market Photo Workshop, Newtown Johannesburg in 2014, and is currently in the process of completing a BA Fine Arts degree at the University of the Witwatersrand. “My work explores spirituality and mythology. It is about the expanse inbetween and around the macrocosm of the spiritual realm and the realm of the physical lived experience. The work seeks to explore belief in Myths and signs, particularly as it relates to the world of dreams and the physical lived experience. It seeks to gain an understanding of the spiritual signifiers we encounter, as well as to suggest or assert a meaning to these spiritual encounters.” – Tshepo Bopape.
The exhibition also featured artworks from Dimpho Lehoko, Lusanda Ndita, Khanya Zibaya, Stephen Langa, Lerato Ntili who won the Johannesburg Stock Exchange Art Collection Acquisition. Keabetswe Seema will now begin her three months studio residency culminating in a solo exhibition at Everard Read/CIRCA Gallery in Cape Town later this year, Tshepo Bopape will also begin his nine months studio residency, his solo exhibition will be held at the DALRO Offices in Johannesburg in March 2025.
