Bioart + Design Africa
VIAD
Imminent and Eminent Ecologies
Nandipha Mntambo
Nandipha Mntambo (b. 1982, Mbabane, Eswatini) completed an MFA at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, in 2007. She is currently based in Johannesburg. Originally intending to study forensic pathology, Mntambo’s career took an unexpected turn towards Fine Arts, where she discovered her passion for exploring the human body through sculpture, photography, video, and mixed media.
Mntambo is best known for her cowhide sculptures, where the cured hide is draped over human forms and set with resin, challenging the relationship between humans and animals. These investigations into organic nature and the corporeal explore themes of performance, gender, identity, life, and death.
In 2017, the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa presented Material Value, a solo exhibition of her work, including the impressive installation EMABUTFO (2012), in which dozens of hide/human spectres were suspended in mid-air. Her bronze sculpture Ophelia (2015) is a permanent acquisition in the Norval Foundation’s sculpture garden in Cape Town. Mntambo won the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art in 2011, for which she produced the travelling exhibition Faena. She was shortlisted for the AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize in Canada (2014), was a Civitella Ranieri Fellow (2013), and received the Wits/BHP Billiton Fellowship (2010).
General Artist Statement
Mntambo states: “My intention is to explore the physical and tactile properties of hide and aspects of control that allow or prevent me from manipulating this material in the context of the female body and contemporary art. I have used cowhide as a means to subvert expected associations with corporeal presence, femininity, sexuality, and vulnerability. The work I create seeks to challenge and subvert preconceptions regarding the representation of the female body."
Specific Artist Statement on Balandzeli (2004)
This work refers to a mass expedition from one place to another. Balandzeli, suggests an unquestioning conformity and ‘following’ towards and unknown destination: a migration, relocation, exodus, movement, stampede or herding. Engaging a mixture of beauty and ugliness, life and death one is not sure if the procession is towards peace or war.
These sculptures moulded on a mannequin made from my own body are in procession, one black hairy, visibly female body after the other, guided by a leader. Women and especially Black women all over the world are overwhelmed by dangers, always at risk. As a Black woman I feel that our bodies are sites upon which various forms of violence are exercised daily, both in public and private realms. Yet we continue to assert ourselves and fight to position ourselves outside of destructive cultural and social associations. This work presents a direct reference to women using their bodies as a form of protest and protection as well as the undeniable fusion of beauty and beast that exists in all human beings.