Meet The Bag Factory Young Womxn Studio Bursary 2021 winners: Princia Matungulu and Kutlwano Monyai

The Bag Factory is delighted to announce that Princia Matungulu and Kutlwano Monyai have been selected as joint recipients of the annual Young Womxn Studio Bursary, funded by Bag Factory alumni artist Sam Nhlengethwa. They will share a fully funded studio bursary at the Bag Factory for twelve months from 01 October 2021 to 30 September 2022. 

Impressed with both artists’ work and noting how well the previous winners, Cheriese Dilrajh and Hemali Khoosal, worked as co-recipients, we decided to repeat the offer for the bursary to two promising womxn artists for another year. Princia’s practice is a combination of weaving, sculpture and storytelling; whereby the approach towards the materiality, the intricacy of the weaving process and the resulting sculpture bears record of a personal, inferred or imagined history. Princia employs weaving processes as a form of silent protest — a means of understanding Congolese traditions, norms and values of ‘proper’ womanhood, which sometimes overlap and intersect with those of women from the African diaspora. Kutlwano uses familiar materials that resonates with her life experiences and has over the years mastered her style of painting and mixed materials experiments which germinated from the obsession of maps. We cannot wait to see what they produce as individual artists as well as collaborators while at the Bag Factory. 

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

PRINCIA MATUNGULU, born in 1999 in Lubumbashi, DR Congo, is a Johannesburg based artist currently completing her degree in Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. As a Congolese immigrant navigating through the South African landscape, she draws from her background and identity. Her series of work, Nouveaux Mémoire Vieux Pagne, 2020 (New Memory Old Cloth) was part of Archive of Forgetfulness’ group exhibition. She has been part of the Cosmosis exhibition at The Holy Art Gallery in London, UK and has also recently been a finalist and participant of the Wits Young Artist Award 2021. 

KUTLWANO MONYAI, born in 1996, in Limpopo, South Africa, has a degree in Fine and Applied Arts from the Tshwane University of Technology (2018). She is currently practicing as a full time artist, art researcher and a writer. Kutlwano has exhibited in a number of group shows which includes the 2016 Top 100 for Thami Mnyele Awards, The Hybrid Culture in 2016 at Tut Gallery, Abstraction Through Figuration at Art Lovers in 2017, Joburg Fringe in 2018 at the Project Space, “The Genesis” 2018 hosted at the Pretoria Art Museum and later at the BKhz studios, Turbine Art Fair 2019 with UNTITL’D collective, KASRP Exhibition at the Pretoria Art Museum in 2019. Kutlwano was an education assistant at the Pretoria Art Museum from 2017 to 2019 and has exhibited with She Impressions under their 2021 “She empowered project”. She participated in the Beads & Air (Art In Residency) at Modern Arts Project South Africa in May 2021 and was recently selected for the 2021 Collection of the Artist Solidarity Assistance Project (ASAP), run by the Candice Berman Initiative. She is now represented by the Candice Berman Gallery. 

ABOUT THE BAG FACTORY ARTISTS’ STUDIOS

The Bag Factory is a non-profit contemporary visual art organisation in Newtown, Johannesburg. With a pioneering 30-year history of providing a supportive infrastructure for artists, the Bag Factory is unique in combining art making with cultural debate and art exhibitions, thereby creating a fertile international environment for experimentation, innovation, and cultural dialogue between creatives in South Africa and the rest of the world. We provide studio space to a cross-generational community of Johannesburg based artists, and we host a prestigious international artist and curator residency programme. We present regular exhibitions in our gallery that showcase new work by emerging artists to the wider public, and we also support the professional development of artists and curators through workshops, mentorship, and the prestigious David Koloane and Cassirer Welz awards. All our programmes are accompanied by a public programme that encourages greater understanding of contemporary visual art and stimulates interaction between artists and the local community. We are affiliated with the international Triangle Network.