Nkhensani Mkhari

Nkhensani Mkhari (b. 1994) is a contemporary curator and post-disciplinary artist. His broad practice spans photography, painting, performance art, sound design, and new media. Mkhari‘s artworks function as multimodal material-semiotic metaphors. Mkhari is an artist whose work explores the concept of identity and subjectivity in a unique way. Drawing inspiration from bantu-cosmology and a triadic understanding of being, he challenges epistemic erasure and traditional notions of personhood.

Nkhensani Mkhari (b. 1994) is a multidisciplinary artist and polymath working across Johannesburg, Cape Town, Hamburg, and Magoebaskloof. Their practice navigates the intersections of identity, subjectivity, and the entangled nature of existence, drawing deeply from Bantu cosmology and a triadic understanding of being. Working without a traditional studio, Mkhari engages in a fragmentary and recompositional process that resists fixed categories. Their practice incorporates 3D scanning, sculpture, monotype printing, and repurposed studio waste—material strategies that transform cultural and historical traces into new visual languages. This layered approach invites viewers into a dialogue with memory, perception, and the multiplicity of self. Rooted in both cultural and intellectual heritage—growing up in a horticultural environment with a botanist father and a linguist mother—Mkhari’s work bridges the academic and emotional. Their mobility is not only geographic but conceptual, functioning as both medium and metaphor. Imagery drawn from Tshonga and Setswana traditions, water, and language reflect on themes of rootlessness, belonging, and return. Mkhari’s art is a quiet resistance to demands for legibility, particularly those often imposed on Black artists in South Africa. By embracing multiplicity, vulnerability, and alternative modes of knowing, they challenge dominant Western frameworks. Their work—rich in colour, storytelling, and poetic gesture—offers emotional weight without spectacle, foregrounding fragments, memory, and the labour of sense-making. Mkhari’s work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Oregon Contemporary Center for the Arts, the Fellbach Kleinplastik Triennale, and the Goethe-Institut Johannesburg, and is held in both private and public collections. The artist has become a respected practitioner and thinker in the arts and cultural arena in the global South. His work experience includes being the assistant director with Azu Nyabonga at the African Art Foundation at Lagos. In 2024, David came across Nkhensani Mkhari's work being shown at the Johannesburg Art Fair with Church Gallery. Mkhari's intimate works reminded David of the work of Agnes Martin. After an introduction to Mkhari, David invited him to visit our workshop at Arts on Main. In December 2024, he took up that offer and came in to work on monotypes, working alongside printers Roxy Kaczmarek and Kim-Lee Loggenberg-Tim. He continued his collaboration in 2025, resulting in a body of work that was shown at the David Krut Gallery, Johannesburg, in March of the same year, his first exhibition with David Krut Projects.