David Krut Arts is pleased to present Luhambo (The Journey), a new body of work by Nthabiseng Kekana. Bringing together charcoal drawings, monotypes, drypoint editions and mixed-media textile works, the exhibition reflects on Kekana’s personal and spiritual journey from artist to traditional healer.
Luhambo, meaning “the journey”, brings together works that reflect different stages of Kekana’s life: experiences, transformations, moments of spiritual awakening and encounters that have shaped the person she is becoming. Rather than presenting this journey as a fixed or completed passage, the exhibition considers transformation as an ongoing process in which art, spirituality, identity and healing remain deeply intertwined.
“Luhambo is a homecoming to myself, honouring the paths I have walked and the person I am still becoming.” — Nthabiseng Kekana
Within Kekana’s practice, art functions as both medium and instrument—an offering to the universe. She describes her works as gestures of exchange between the self and a greater, ineffable whole. Through spirituality, mythology, identity, African folktales and the feminine archetypes of mother, healer and creator, Kekana engages with questions surrounding the human condition and her own place within it.
Across the exhibition, Kekana moves between mediums and approaches. Her charcoal drawings and prints retain a sense of immediacy and intimacy, while the layered surfaces of her mixed-media textile works suggest the accumulation of memory, experience and spiritual knowledge. The movement between mediums mirrors the fluidity of the journey itself: there is no single point of arrival, but rather a continual process of becoming.
This sense of movement and transformation is also reflected in Kekana’s collaboration with the David Krut Workshop, where she has worked with three different printers over the past two years: Roxy Kaczmarek, Jesse Shepstone and Kim-Lee Loggenberg-Tim. Each collaboration has resulted in a distinct body of work, while maintaining a cohesive thread across different processes and approaches. The workshop becomes another space of exchange, where ideas are translated through different materials, techniques and forms of collaboration, allowing each printer to bring their own knowledge and interpretation to the process.
A recurring interest in the cyclical nature of existence runs through Kekana’s work. Natural materials, particularly raffia, alongside earthy tones and loose marks, have featured as connective elements within her practice, operating both materially and symbolically as threads between the conscious and subconscious, the individual and the ancestral. In Luhambo, these ideas extend into the language of print and drawing, where repetition, layering, impression and trace evoke the ways in which memory and experience accumulate, shift and resurface.