Biography
Masindi Ikhona Nafisa Mbolekwa (b. 2002) is a young artist living and practicing in Johannesburg, South Africa. Mbolekwa’s primary practice is a conversation with painting, history, culture, space, community, and God. Born into a proud and rich indigenous culture in a space of little tolerance, he finds himself caught between the necessity of modernism, and the romance of tradition; the institutional pull of the west, and the soul-bound call of home.
In interrogating identity, colonial mechanisms, religion, metaphysics, and the popularized, mythicized histories of “man” (as centred on the hegemonic west), he fashions a mythos of his own: an explorative pseudo-narrative to ground his experienced state of ‘groundlessness’. A reflection of liminality, a questioning of binaries both real and constructed, a debate with God, an ethereal safe space, a descent into the shadows of the divine.
