Cape Town

STEVENSON is pleased to present sehlahla se tukang empa se sa che, a solo exhibition of new works by Thato Toeba, their first in the Cape Town gallery. 

Musoke Nalwoga, a writer, curator and Toeba’s interlocutor, observes:

A bush, aflame, not consumed searches at the intersection of modernity, nationalism and traditionalism, looking for enduring cracks. Reading the Southern African context as a geography burning under siege. Unassuming crowds in cracks re-bound by circumstantial kinship. A death rattle, a wailing village rushes through your heart and breaks it. Know that you are alive now.

In eight acts, Toeba enters the photograph, falling into it like a miner drops to the depth of the earth, digging for histories unbound. On their way down, Toeba reveals a trail of silhouettes and mirrors in photomontage that spill into installations. A history, remade.

Dust takes flight. A gust, now sharp winds. The miners return to a world long removed. Tired feet down a beaten path. Now, heaven facing feet, wives enter the earth. Simmered for days, burial broths are still most delicious. To be in the belly of a world, consumed but not absorbed. Lesotho swallows South Africa’s lamentations the way a child swallows syrup for a bitter cough.

Civilization is roaming still. Looking for congregations of dreamers. You are here too, entangled. In 1850, when the mines opened in South Africa, your father stopped being a man, he is a machine now. Indeed, think of him as a screw, atop a new-age European apparatus that swells from the West into the South with unspirited bravado. At your father’s deathbed, when your mother brings a pair of boots and trousers, take the photograph. The Administration of Estates and Inheritance Act, Lesotho 2024

When the train comes, and you press your bones into the brim of a rusting cabin, know that you have entered the real world. You work here now. Bearing witness to a system that has fractured your father’s life and there he is; body and soul, in labour, he is labour, in ill treatment, in changing language, in culture forgotten, in identity invaded. He is labour.

sehlahla se tukang empa se sa che marks Toeba's first exhibition as a represented artist, and follows the announcement of their win of the 15th FNB Art Prize. Fela sa Hamojel, a collaborative project between Toeba and Morena Leraba, continues at Buro Stedelijik, Amsterdam, until 23 October.

The exhibition opens Saturday 18 October, 10am to 1pm.