Collaboration History
Pebofatso Mokoena first collaborated with the team at David Krut Workshop (DKW) in the production of a hard-ground etching in 2018. It was titled Statistical Weakness and later shown at the 2019 iterations of Fine Art Print Fair (hosted at Parktown Girls), Turbine Art Fair and LATITUDES Art Fair. The collaboration built on the relationship Mokoena established as an intern at David Krut Projects (DKP) in 2016.
In 2019, he was commissioned among four other artists to do a multi-colour silkscreen print for LATITUDES Art Fair as part of their VIP Package. The resulting print ¾ Progress on the Edge of Play was completed in collaboration with silkscreen expert printer Roxy Kaczmarek from DKW and displayed prominently at LATITUDES.
Over 2019-2020 Mokoena worked at DKW towards his first solo show at DKP – Internal Probes – which opened in February 2020.
Biography
Pebofatso Mokoena was born in Alberton in August 1993, 8 months before South Africa’s first democratic elections. He completed his high school career at Bracken High School in 2011, acquiring both a distinction in Visual Art and the Design School Art Trophy. In 2014 he completed his NDip (Visual Art) at the University of Johannesburg. Mokoena has participated in a number of competitions and curated exhibitions including Thami Mnyele Fine Art Awards, Diptych, That Art Fair 2015, Fresh Produce in 2014, Inner Nature in Cape Town, Fortunes Remixed, and South African Voices: A New Generation of Printmakers in Washington DC. In 2020 Mokoena received the merit award for the Wits Young Artist Award for his artwork Kea hoNkgono leNtatemoholo (I’m Taking a Walk to the Grandparents), in which he returns to what he has termed the “height of ethno-tribal, sociopolitical and geo-transportational violence in Thokoza in 1993.” Read more about the work in the Mail & Guardian article Working alone, together: presenting the Wits Young Artist Award 2020 winners.
Mokoena’s interest lies in the entangled organisations of how organic and man-made geographies shape multiple environments. Through interdisciplinary practices which include, primarily, painting and printmaking – but also drawing and film and the use of online platforms, Pebofatso uses his own personal narratives and a consistent application of experimental enquiry as tools to make sense of the chaotic integratedness of the current world he lives in.
Mokoena’s work orbits in between critical discourses across the spheres of visual art architecture, global culture, and aesthetics. These interests both open and bridge gaps in his own understanding of the importance of being alive in a world that, in theory, in becoming smaller and smaller.
His work exists in the Springs Art Library Collection, the South African Embassy Art Collection (Washington, D.C.), the Smithsonian Museum of African Art in Washington DC, and other private collections.
Additional media
Chris Thurman Business Day Live Article – Art helps us to interrogate our climate of isolation
David Krut Podcast | Pebofatso Mokoena – Internal Probes: Reading a Body
