Masindi Nafisa Mbolekwa (b.2002) is a visual artist from Johannesburg. Mbolekwa's practice is an engagement with the relationship between the body and it's movement through exterior space, and the reflection of space in the interior. Drawing from a Xhosa cosmological understanding of space, where land is interwoven within memory, identity and language, and movement through it is ritual and a critical aspect of self, Mbolekwa's painting taps into a mytho-poetic realm where the body is in constant negotiation with it's surroundings or lack thereof. In this work, the body’s movements are a reflection of the constant metaphysical re-affirmation of black being-in-the-world, and the spaces and non-spaces through which it moves are agentic forces within themselves.
Mbolekwa holds an Honours in Fine Art from the University of The Witwatersrand (2023). His first Solo presentation “Feast of Flesh and Prayer” was held at Ellis House Gallery in May 2025. He has participated in various group exhibitions including ‘Crossroads: Tsila Tse Pedi’ (2024) at the Viewing Room Gallery, ‘Figurative Frontiers’ (2024) at RMB Latitudes with Origin Art, Tswela Pele’ (2025) with Kalashnikovv Gallery, ‘Symptom: Invisible Forces’ (2025) with Bode Gallery, and ‘Things Have Not Been Whole For Some Time’ (2026) with Ebony/Curated. Mbolekwa has works in the Nandos UK Art Collection and Moleskine Foundation Collection.
Statement c.5.26
This practice is the evidence of ritual.
The ritual is awareness of, and reflection on the body as an anchor for the movement of self through meta/physical space and time, and a fabulation on that process as a form of critical engagement with history, ontology, ubuXhosa bam, postcoloniality, masculinity, family and spirituality.
Worked meticulously into every form, texture, void and shadow in this body of work is a poetics of black being and its methods of self-affirmation within the anti-black architecture of the African Postcolony. These paintings consider my position as a Johannesburg-born and resident Xhosa man, who contends materially and spiritually with the historical conditions which have separated me geographically and culturally from my home in the Eastern Cape village of Macacuma. In them symbols, objects and the auto-portrayed body are moved through space and non-space in ways mediated by the unobservable. Satellite-imagery, soil and limestone are brought together in a gathering act of feeling-thoughts, references and traditions to allow for newer iterations of the Xhosa rituals from which essentialist thought insists I am divorced, and new assertive conceptions of not only ‘being-black-in-the-world' but also of my ‘being-Xhosa-in-the-world'.
Drawing from contemporary black theory and Xhosa cosmology these artworks are a site for the collapse of metaphsyical space, physical space and the linearity of time. In engaging with the maps of my home, the rituals of my ancestors and the surreal spaces of my interior and memory, these works – fabulations themselves on theory and feeling – become a method for real and intentional engagement with my history, culture, ancestors and positionality. They produce metaphysical ripples which spill through the veil to produce material effects on the ‘real’ world which births their ‘rational unreality’.
Great consideration, research and love are suffused into the making of this work. For in it is housed a theory of what it means to experience home as (un)limited to geographical place, to engage with the past as a present affect, to move through the anti-black world wearing the features of my ancestors, to theorize through making, and to make beyond the soft power of empirical thought and process.
On the canvas a poetry of the ineffable occurs. An acknowledgement of the vastness, the nihility, and the pessimism which surrounds black ontological homelessness becomes the very reason that the work must be made, an anti-empiricist pushback based on the knowledge of the spirit. In the logical acknowledgement of an Afropessimist reality, this work is an attempt at a spiritual circumvention of logic itself, for it was western logic that wrought upon blackness, the malady of blackness. In this attempt, there is a radical practice of existential hope. In the attempt there hides an amen shot through the day into the night-world, into the 2-dimensional, into the meta-reality.
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