Artist Talk with WonderBuhle
Watch the video of last week’s artist talk below.
One week ago we hosted an artist talk during the public opening of the exhibition uNyezi by WonderBuhle. The artist spoke with Banele Khoza (visual artist, gallerist, and studio manager WonderBuhle), Azu Nwagbogu (director of the African Artists’ Foundation) and Paul Goodwin (curator and professor at University of the Arts London) about his new works featured in the exhibition, its theme, the symbolism in his paintings, as well as WonderBuhle’s position as a young South African artist in a globalized art world.
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Artist Talk:
Featuring WonderBuhle, Banele Khoza, Azu Nwagbogu, and Paul Goodwin<
Saturday March 26, 2022
Video by Jaar & Dag Media
WonderBuhle is a South African-born and Durban-based visual artist whose exhibition uNyezi is opening this weekend and runs till May 1, 2022. The exhibition takes the name of his daughter uNyezi, meaning the moon or the one that sits among the stars.
Banele Khoza is a Swaziland-born and South African-based visual artist. He firstly enrolled at the London International School of Fashion in Johannesburg, but soon realized his passion was drawing. Khoza holds a BTech in Fine Arts from Tshwane University of Technology, Pretoria. In 2017 he won the prestigious Gerard Sekoto Award and with it a three-month residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris.
Azu Nwagbogu is the Founder and Director of African Artists’ Foundation (AAF), a non-profit organisation based in Lagos, Nigeria. Nwagbogu was elected as the Interim Director/ Head Curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art in South Africa from June 2018 to August 2019. He also serves as Founder and Director of LagosPhoto Festival, an annual international arts festival of photography held in Lagos. He is the creator of Art Base Africa, a virtual space to discover and learn about contemporary African Art.
Paul Goodwin is a curator, researcher and educator based in London. Goodwin’s research focuses on Black British Art and African diaspora art since 1980 and transnationalism in contemporary art production. In his interdisciplinary research project Revisioning Black Urbanism at Goldsmiths, University of London, from 2006 to 2010 he explored topics relating to urbanism and the generative potential of ‘Blackness’ in cities such as London, Lisbon and Paris.
ABOUT WonderBuhle
WonderBuhle, born 1989 in South Africa, is a Durban-based visual artist from Kwa-Ngcolosi, a village that is still ruled by a chief. He started making art as a hobby at the age of nine. He says that his mother encouraged him to explore art as a career as he used to play with charcoal from the fire and draw stick figures on the walls of the house as a child.
WonderBuhle received his first formal training through the BAT Centre Artists in Residency (AIR) Program and went on to study fine art through the Velobala apprenticeship program at Durban University of Technology, under the mentorship of Themba Shibase.
The artist states: “I understand my artistic practice as a space between my inner soul, my dreams and my identity. I communicate my views from where I am standing as a black youth in South African society and the world at large. South Africa is in a moment of self-realization; reflecting and embracing its cultural diversities, whilst rewriting its stories through the lenses of young people who are curious, like myself.”
WonderBuhle had his first solo exhibition at the Durban Art Gallery in 2018 and has been included in numerous group shows at Unit, (London, 2020); The Art House (Wakefield, 2018); Michaelis Gallery (Cape Town, 2017); KZNSA (Durban, 2015) and the African Art Centre (Durban, 2014). In 2016, he was the recipient of Bremer Kunststipendium Art Grant (three-month residency) and in 2020; he took part in the La Brea Studio Artists Residency in L.A.
