Welcome back listeners! In today’s episode, join our social media manager, Jana Findlay, in conversation with artist and member of Occupy the Gallery, Lusanda Ndita. Over a series of recorded WhatsApp notes, they discuss Ndita’s work, his background and his relationship with Occupy the Gallery and Mary Sibande. They also discuss our current exhibition Reclaiming Quarters, featuring the work of Lusanda Ndita, Hoek Swaratlhe and Mary Sibande.
Lusanda Ndita is a Johannesburg based visual artist. His works make extensive use of oral histories, photo albums and other domestic archival resources. His work interrogates the archetypal family structure, and its many inferences to society, one’s manhood and historical ties. In doing so his work further examines the validity of presence juxtaposed by absence and how regardless of family ties male role models still exist. Through the use of domestic archive materials passed onto him by his mother such as family photo albums and identification documents, Ndita attempts to bridge the gaps in his own identity and associations to manhood via deconstructing images of his missing father figures thus creating a silhouette to reflect their identity. These are often presented in various layers, most notably miners ledgers, Dom pass identity documents and work permits.
At the request of Mary Sibande who was working on a collaborative initiative for a group of young Joburg artists that she had taken on a mentoring role, we accepted Lusanda Ndita and Hoek Swaratlhe to come into the David Krut Workshop (DKW) at Arts On Main. Our printer Sbongiseni Khulu took over the mentoring process with these artists in gaining an understanding of the collaborative activities which are practiced at DKW.
In November 2023, Ndita came in for 5 days, for a concentrated mentoring session to learn about working on paper and the various mediums of printmaking. Sbongiseni took him through new mediums in the combination of monotype and pronto lithography, which they had gained insights from other workshops where they had been working.
