INDEX: INDEPENDENT ARTIST EXHIBITION presented by National Arts Council

Nwabisa Ntlokwana, Born in 1988 in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, is a Johannesburg-based contemporary visual artist whose practice explores themes of motherhood, identity, and material transformation. Working primarily with unconventional material. Ntlokwana transforms discarded and organic materials into sculptural forms that carry emotional weight and cultural resonance.

Her work is deeply personal, drawing from her experiences of motherhood and the memories of her late mother, who was a photographer and introduced her to the world of art at an early age. Through layered textures and tactile surfaces, Ntlokwana creates sculptural objects that serve as vessels of remembrance, resilience, and reflection. Her practice investigates the complexities of maternal identity, how women carry, nurture, and continuously reinvent themselves through cycles of care, inheritance, and transformation.

Ntlokwana has participated in several exhibitions and sculpture fairs, gaining recognition within South Africa’s contemporary art scene. Her work has been presented in group exhibitions with galleries such as The Viewing Room Gallery, No End Gallery, and Melrose Gallery. She has also participated in notable art fairs that continue to expand the visibility of her sculptural language. Most recently, she collaborated with Viviers Studio for the Cape Town Art Fair, bringing her sculptural sensibility into dialogue with contemporary fashion and design.

Her current body of work, Motherwood, explores the relationship between wood and leather as materials that mirror the life cycles of motherhood, strength, endurance, and transformation. Through this ongoing series, Ntlokwana reflects on the layered nature of maternal identity and the ways in which memory, body, and material intersect.

Based in Johannesburg, a city rich with cultural diversity and creative exchange, Ntlokwana continues to expand her practice while working toward her long-term vision of creating monumental sculptural work.

Ditiro Mashigo is a South African artist, textile designer, and researcher working at the intersection of fibre art, surface design, and material storytelling. Her practice engages textile as both medium and knowledge system, exploring memory, identity, and embodied ways of seeing through processes such as weaving, printmaking, embroidery, and garment construction.

Mashigo holds a Postgraduate Diploma (2023), an Advanced Diploma (2022) in Fine and Studio Arts, and National Diplomas in Textile Design (2016) and Fashion (2014), all from the Tshwane University of Technology. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions across South Africa and internationally, including Ge Maru a Ema Ema (RAMPA, Porto, 2026) and Written in Thread (RMB Latitudes Art Fair, 2024).

Her research-led practice is grounded in collaboration and community engagement, with projects spanning institutional commissions, public programming, and mentorship. She has been recognised through the Dean’s Prestigious Scholarship (2023), the STILL Artists Residency (2024), and as a finalist for the Cassirer Welz Award (2025).

Mashigo’s work positions textile practice as a site of cultural memory, contemporary inquiry, and future-making within the African context.

Resego Sefora (b. 2003) is a fine artist based in Cape Town, South Africa. Working at the intersection of sonic installation and camera-less photography, Sefora's practice investigates the materiality of sound and the body as primary, formative languages. By expanding on the "sonic" and physical imprints as tangible media, she utilises these registers as a decolonial tool to subvert traditional Western art-making methodologies.

Her work seeks to unfix postcolonial subjectivities, challenging the perceived silence of her colonial foundations through resonance, vibration and light-sensitive documentation. Sefora's broader ways of making explore the tension between labour and leisure, utilising time consuming, traditional chemical processes to record moments of stillness and sound.

Drawing inspiration from the auditory and domestic landscape of her family home in Dwarsberg, North West, Sefora explores themes of belonging and collective voice. She holds a BA in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, where she developed a unique approach to depicting sound through photograms. Influenced by contemporary critical theory, her practice remains centred on interpretations of belonging and collective force, articulating potential futures where Black existence are fully realised through the convergence of sound, image, and time.

Mhlonishwa Zulu is a contemporary South African artist, born in 2002. Storytelling has been a steadfast companion in the artist’s life since childhood, ignited by the captivating narratives woven by their cousin and uncles. Their tales - imbued with intricate details of distant lands and enigmatic figures - transported the artist beyond the boundaries of their KwaZulu-Natal environment, inviting them to explore the richness of imagination and the potential for transformation. This early exposure shaped the artist’s understanding of identity and place, inspiring an ongoing exploration of what it means to create new narratives from lived experiences.

The artist’s work seeks to explore the liminal spaces between thought and action, challenge perceptions, and invite viewers to reflect on their own internal dialogues. Through Christian religious sentiments and symbolic reconciliation, they aspire to create a visual lexicon thatspeaks to shared experiences, illuminating the moments in between where potential resides, and where stories are waiting to be told.

Through this continuous journey of artistic exploration, the artist invites others to join in pondering the profound questions of existence, identity, and interconnectedness that emerge in spaces we occupy.

Selwyn Steyn (b. 1997, South Africa) is an artist and architect based in Paris. He completed a master’s degree in architecture in 2022 at the University of Cape Town as well as an Executive Master’s degree in computational design at École des Ponts ParisTech.

His work arises from a knowledge base grounded in spatiality and place-making and deploys spatial-social, architectonic and phenomenological reasoning within his visual practice.

Working primarily in painting, he examines the spatial and atmospheric conditions of the built environment in South Africa, considering how landscapes and urban spaces accumulate memory, ideology, and lived experience.

His paintings often take the form of restrained vignettes: fragments of infrastructure, terrain, and architecture in which meaning emerges through atmosphere, juxtaposition, and spatial tension.

Selwyn has taken part in shows both locally and abroad, including with Reservoir Projects, THK Gallery, BKHZ, the UJ Art Museum and the National Arts Festival. In 2023, Selwyn presented a solo booth at FNB Art Joburg titled Studies from the In-between. In 2026, he presented a solo booth in the curated Tomorrows/Today section at Investec Cape Town Art Fair.

Vas Putter is a differently-abled artist currently residing between KwaZulu Natal and Johannesburg. Her training includes various art disciplines with a focus on Printmaking and Art History. She is fascinated with the diaspora of peoples and the displacement of artefacts. Working in paint mediums, printmaking and assemblage with discarded objects, her work explores humanitarian and environmental issues while at the same time unpacking historical and contemporary influences on her life. 

Her commissions include the cover of “In the Storms of History – South Africa’s Journey from Slavery to Democracy” (L Grobbelaar 2023), artworks for the National Museum of Bloemfontein (Art Bank SA 2024) and waste-to-art sculptures for the Trade and Industrial Policy Strategies conference (2024). 

Putter has taken part in various group exhibitions across the country as well as held a solo show at the Alliance Francaise de Pretoria in 2025. In 2024, she has exhibited at The Inaugural Global Artivism Conference (Tshwane). Her project Averting the Gaze, highlighting the links between the global supply chain and neo-slavery, was supported by The National Arts Council. In March 2025 she was a panellist for the National Arts Council 2025 Human Right’s Day Webinar as well as the guest speaker for the opening of The Printing Girls exhibition at the Association of Arts, Pretoria – speaking about fostering community and inclusivity in the arts. In September 2025, she was invited to speak at the annual South African Visual Art Historians conference about the ‘Averting the Gaze’ artworks, focusing on humanitarian and environmental practices. 

Khanyisa Agnes Brancon (b. 2002, Tzaneen, Limpopo) is a South African artist hailing from Polokwane, Limpopo and educated at the University of the Witwatersrand with a BAFA. Her artistic practice uses photography, printmaking and installation as mediums of expression. Brancon’s practice is an interdisciplinary approach of textiles as vessels to honour the use of materiality in her work.

Her practice is an excavation of time, unravelling timelines of past and present indigenous histories. A moment of reclamation, her work creates narratives that hold space for memory, never forgetting what was. Grand themes of colonial erasure, maternal lineage and indigenous knowledge systems are addressed throughout her work with the focus on her Xitsonga culture and its femininity expressed through the Xibelani.

Shana Ellappa (b. 1999, Johannesburg, South Africa) is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher based in Cape Town. Her practice moves between visual art, life writing, and memory work, exploring personal and collective histories through acts of reclamation. Grounded in storytelling as both method and material, she constructs counter-archives that centre lived experience and familial memory.

Drawing on oral histories and embodied knowledge, her work translates these narratives into visual forms through recurring symbolic languages. Informed by African feminisms, postcolonial theory, and autoethnography, Ellappa’s practice interrogates the intersections of identity, history, and belonging. She holds a Master’s degree in Art from Rhodes University.

Nomvula Hoko b. 1996, South Africa. She is a Johannesburg-based visual artist and educator whose practice serves as a conduit between the physical and spiritual realms. Born in Sebokeng and currently residing in Soweto, Hoko officially embarked on her artistic journey in 2018. Her early development was shaped by the foundational mentorship of Senzeni Marasela, which ignited her exploration of identity and ancestral calling.

Long before entering formal academia, Hoko developed a profound affinity for printmaking through the mentorship of Luzuko Dayile. It was under Dayile’s guidance that she first mastered the technical complexities of the medium, allowing printmaking to evolve into her primary linguistic tool and a profound form of personal expression.

Hoko’s academic career began in 2022 and continues to the present, providing a theoretical framework for her established technical skills. She earned a Diploma in Fine Arts from Walter Sisulu University, followed by an Advanced Diploma in Fine and Applied Arts from Tshwane University of Technology. She is currently furthering her scholarly and creative investigations as a BA Honours in Visual Arts candidate at the University of Johannesburg.

Her professional experience reflects a deep commitment to the South African arts ecosystem. Hoko has served as an assistant printmaker for Blessing Ngobeni at Art Lefatshe and contributed to the education sector at PJ Simelani  Secondary School. In 2024, she acted as a printmaker facilitator for the Art and Ubuntu Trust, while also curating a group exhibition and hosting workshops that bridge the gap between creative practice and art business management.

Hoko’s contributions have been widely recognized through several prestigious accolades. She received the Best 2D Art Award at the 2023 MEC Eastern Cape Heritage Awards and was honored for Best Arts and Culture Management in 2026. Her 2023 academic solo exhibition, Woman in Process, held at The Artroom Gallery, served as a pivotal exploration of womanhood and spiritual transformation, framing her personal odyssey through the lens of formal research.

A member of The Printmaking Girls collective, Hoko remains a dedicated advocate for the medium in South Africa. Her practice continues to evolve, utilizing cultural heritage and ancestral themes to create poignant works that act as a bridge between the viewer and the intangible dimensions of the soul.

Marlise Keith is known for her mixed media collages; large-scale drawings in pencil, ink, and acrylics; for her small sculptures of fabric, embroidery and found objects, and recently, irregular shaped canvas paintings.

Her subject matter is vast, drawing inspiration from a mental medley of horrific news headlines, colonial history, fauna and flora, psychopathology, girlhood memories, dreams, reading and her hemicrania continua and chronic migraines. Subjects too daunting, too confused, or too subliminal to articulate in neat words and sentences, are processed through mark-making; offering an alternative “understanding” of a world that often does not make sense in traditional, logical language. This violence emerges in plentiful paint; sometimes it’s suggested by the very act of mark-making itself – paper and canvas are gouged, scratched, stitched, torn, folded, and nailed.

The question of value is often explored through Keith’s other choices of media. In her assemblages she juxtaposes found objects and media of varying value: Well-worn but beloved t-shirts, expensive gesso, broken curios, highly specialised micro-mosaic, R5 Store purchases and luxurious fabrics are combined and further worked with embroidery, intricate line, fur, paint, and sequins. The creatures seem to emerge directly from Keith’s self-labelled mental “soup”, equal parts cute and hideous, dark, and witty.

The result is a richly layered body of work, both violent and uncanny, made more surreal with a playful use of colour and humour. The latter draws in the viewer to a closer scrutiny of the darker complexities lurking beneath, which offer endless possibilities of meaning.

Mncedisi Mkhize (b.1996, Pietermaritzburg) is a Durban-based visual artist. He studied at Tatham Art Gallery under the mentorship of Mrs Pinky Nkabinde before pursuing Fine Art and Design at Thekwini College.

He later developed his printmaking practice at Artist Proof Studio in Johannesburg. Mkhize has participated in mural initiatives and group exhibitions, including KZNSA Gallery.

His practice explores the identity of Black people, particularly the youth, within contemporary social spaces. Through portraiture and figurative forms, he celebrates beauty, resilience, and the complexity of everyday lived experiences.