Closing Date: 23 October 2024
Exhibition Venue: Everard Read/ CIRCA CAPE TOWN 3 Portswood Road, Cape Town, 8002
On the 1st of October, BNAP Foundation is hosting the official public solo exhibition opening of the 2024 Blessing Ngobeni Art Prize Winner, KEABETSWE SEEMA titled, LET THE FIRE LEAD YOU HOME. The exhibition is set to open at the prestigious Everard Read CIRCA gallery in Cape Town on Tuesday at 6pm.
BNAP Foundation is an NPO that aims to address the needs of emerging artists to be able to sustain themselves in the art industry through residencies and workshops. The Blessing Ngobeni Art Prize is an award that is aimed at assisting young and emerging visual artists to launch their careers in the art industry. The award acknowledges excellence in emerging artists (under 35) specializing in sculpture, drawing, and painting, or mixed media and provides an opportunity to showcase their talents to a broader audience.
It began with a recurring dream. In it, a border of fire acted as an enclosure without engulfing its witness. From this came the instructing body of work let the fire lead you home.
Exhibition Statement: Written by Zaza Hlatswayo
Winner of the 2024 Blessing Ngobeni Art Prize, Keabetswe Seema is an interdisciplinary artist with a practice that is as concerned with resolution as it is with projection.
On the exhibition following the award, Seema says “home is an unknown place in dreamscape that is calling out to me.” On the socio-political/ abstract worlds she occupies, Seema 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 promise land. More than an escapist moment of hope, Seema says the work questions the importance of imagination, fantasy and eluding reality while femme and black.
On making in her capacity 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. Toward the vernacular, Seema’s current intervention involves the collection of insights from several schools of thought including Afro-surrealism, spirituality, semiotics, aristocracy, womanhood and popular culture.
Central to her visual language, Seema says collage gives her 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.
A thorough thread running through her practice, a major part of Seema’s vernacular involves the deliberate inclusion of characters who bare a likeness to her. “It is not only to insert/ assert myself but my mother and grandmother as well because we look so alike… my story is essentially a result of the paths they walked,” explains the artist before she adds; “By referring to the self, I get to reimagine a history or claim an unknown future.” Existing beyond temporal limits, in addition to acknowledging the past and being active about the present, the work subverts patriarchal standards by taking ownership of femme futures. “It almost acts as a form of self-preservation,” she adds.