USHA SEEJARIM
Biography
Usha Seejarim (b. 1974, Bethal, Mpumalanga) is a celebrated South African artist whose work delves into the poetry and politics of the everyday. With a distinct visual language shaped by labour, gender roles, displacement, and domesticity, she transforms ordinary household items like brooms, irons and pegs into meditations on cyclical routines and the socio-political conditions of care and servitude. Her work confronts the tension between identity and obligation, evoking both resilience and vulnerability.
The foundations of her artistic practice were established early in her formative years. For example, when a simple suggestion to draw over images in colouring books ignited a radical sense of artistic autonomy. That spirit of innovation and nonconformity has remained central to her practice. By age 14, with no art education offered at her high school in Lenasia, Seejarim enrolled in Saturday classes at the Federated Union of Black Artists (FUBA) Centre in Newtown, Johannesburg. There, she was mentored by some of the country’s most revered artists including the late David Koloane, Patrick Mautloa, Bongiwe Dhlomo-Mautloa and formed formative friendships, including one with the late Samson Mnisi.
Her formal training includes a Diploma and B-Tech in Fine Art from the University of Johannesburg (then Witwatersrand Technikon), completed in 1999. In 2008, she earned a Master of Arts in Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand, where her research explored notions of commuting through the photography of David Goldblatt and the act of collecting tickets of Carouschka Streijffert. Her academic inquiry centered around the rituals that punctuate daily life; an interest that continues to shape her practice. Currently, Seejarim is completing an MBA at Henley Business School (University of Reading, UK), further extending her engagement with the cultural economy.
A turning point in Seejarim’s trajectory came with Venus at Home (2012–2015), a landmark solo museum exhibition that toured institutions including the Durban Art Gallery, the University of the Northwest, Johannesburg Art Gallery, and Atherstone Gallery as part of the National Arts Festival in Makhanda. The body of work comprised of used domestic tools marked the emergence of her signature approach: reimagining the domestic space as both a site of suppression and a platform for transformation. The series interrogated traditional female roles, revealing layers of servitude, resistance, and power embedded in the objects of home life.
Over the past two decades, Seejarim’s contributions to contemporary art have been widely recognised. She received the inaugural MTN New Contemporaries Award in 2001 and was granted the Ampersand Fellowship in New York in 2003. Her critical acclaim expanded internationally with the Sculpture Prize at the 2018 Dak’Art Biennale in Dakar, Senegal, and the Tomorrow’s/Today Prize at the 2018 Investec Cape Town Art Fair, awarded by the Fondazione Fiera Milano. In 2022, she was honoured with the Chancellor’s Dignitas Award by the University of Johannesburg for her outstanding contribution to the arts, and in 2024, she was shortlisted for the Henrike Grohs Art Award. She was also the featured artist at the 2023 Turbine Art Fair, a recognition of her ongoing impact on the national art scene.
Seejarim’s public artworks are both monumental and intimate in their social resonance. One of her most iconic pieces is the portrait of Nelson Mandela, created from imfibinga seeds and displayed at his funeral in Qunu in 2013. In Soweto, her Freedom Charter series of stone figures (2008) commemorates the historic document’s legacy. Her 2021 installation The Mundane and the Magical, situated outside the Radisson Red Hotel in Johannesburg is made from hundreds of sole plates of domestic irons. The pair of red wings encourage the viewer to reflect upon the history of migrant labour that built Johannesburg as they engage with the interactive artwork.
In 2022, Seejarim became the first African artist to receive a Burning Man Honoraria Grant, debuting a 12-metre, 40-ton steel sculpture of a half a peg in the Nevada desert. This monumental work extended her exploration of the domestic into epic scale. She is currently working on a public art commission in Bremen, Germany, commemorating Laye Alama Condé, an asylum seeker who died in police custody. A project that extends her interest in vulnerability, institutional power, and collective memory.
Seejarim has presented more than ten solo exhibitions, including Transgressing Power at SMAC Gallery (Johannesburg, 2019), Vessel of the Fish at Kunstinstituut Melly (Rotterdam, 2020), and Unfolding Servitude at Southern Guild (Cape Town, 2024). These exhibitions deepen her tactile vocabulary of domestic objects to examine intersectional issues of power, labour, and gender.
Her work has featured in several major group exhibitions, such as The Red Hour at the 2018 Dak’Art Biennale curated by Simon Njami, WomanISM at the Ostrale Biennale (Dresden), and Arte Povera and South African Art: In Conversation at Wits Art Museum (2023), curated by Dr Ilaria Bernardi and Prof Thembinkosi Goniwe.
Currently, Seejarim’s Soft Power, a three-metre vulvic sculpture made of grass brooms, is on view at Iziko South African National Gallery in Motherhood: Paradox and Duality. The work articulates the contradictions inherent in motherhood;strength and fragility, visibility and erasure, rooted in the historic exploitation of racialised domestic labour. Meanwhile, her artwork A Deep Wound, created from wooden pegs parted to form a continuous wound, is exhibited in Le Sel Noir: Perspectives of Black Contemporary Art at Städtische Galerie Villingen-Schwenningen in Germany. Curated by Dr Alejandro Perdomo Daniels, the exhibition reflects on power, trauma, and systemic inequality.
Through both intimate and monumental scales, Usha Seejarim’s practice invites a profound reckoning with the often-unseen labour that shapes our world as an art of presence, persistence, and poetic resistance.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Grass, Roots and Memory (2025) – Grass broom heads, steel; Installation dimensions variable (approx 10 x 3,5 x 2 m) – Courtesy of the artist – Photography by Anthea Pokroy
Grass, Roots and Memory is a site-responsive installation composed of nest-like structures intricately formed from grass brooms. Occupying the gallery in a dispersed, proliferating formation, the work explores the entangled relationships between organic matter, cultural ritual, and the politics of care. By integrating living systems, biodegradable materials, and anthropogenic forms, the installation functions as a living archive of ecological memory and embodied labour.
Grass, as once rooted in soil and now bound into domestic instruments, becomes both subject and material. In this transformed state, it signals a shift from nature to culture, from groundcover to broom, and again to a sculptural form evocative of nesting and habitation. The broom retains its organic origins while destabilising the boundary between the natural and the constructed.
Inspired by the aesthetics of biological systems and the ethics of sustainability, the work foregrounds the overlooked intelligence of plant-based materials and the cyclical life of matter. The nests are metaphors for both sanctuary and entrapment, embedded with residues of cultural memory and the gendered labour of cleaning, gathering, and making home. They echo not only the instinctive architectures of birds and insects but also the cultural architectures that govern human behaviour, reproduction, and displacement.
By invoking the logic of material agency, Grass, Roots and Memory presents a speculative ecology in which domestic detritus evolves into a living system of its own. The installation reimagines the broom not simply as a tool of cleanliness, but as a carrier of ancestral knowledge, a prosthetic extension of the body, and a symbol of human entanglement with the vegetal world.
An iteration of the artwork was first shown at the Center For Less Good Idea, on invitation as part of Season 6, which was co-curated by architect and urban designer Thiresh Govender and dancer and choreographer Sello Pesa, alongside founder William Kentridge and co-animateurs Bronwyn Lace and Phala Ookeditse Phala. The season saw a reimagining of conventional artistic and performative practices through open-ended, cross-disciplinary collaboration and a thoughtful engagement with diverse expressions of labour. The concept of work as central to both our social fabric and economic systems was examined in relation to the complexities of contemporary urban existence.
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