Asemahle Ntlonti

Asemahle Ntlonti (born 1993) is a contemporary South African artist living and working in Cape Town. She is best known for her political work that deals with her experience as a black female growing up in South Africa. Quotes I’m a story-teller and make work to tell stories – whether true or made-up. At the moment, I prefer lingering somewhere between the two. While making this work, I was thinking of a place I call home. The feeling you get when you arrive at a place/space where everything, right there in that present moment, is perfect and you know you are meant to there. I am meant to be here. This marks the beginning of many beautiful things yet to come and yet to be experienced. The place/space that I have created is not utopian, but rather exists by way of finding or accessing it. What I’m trying to achieve with the work, is create an experience of this space, place, or ‘home’; whether in a literal or figurative form. An environment where, on arrival, I remove umthwalo wam (*my baggage), rest, and seek solace. Where I shout at the top of my lungs, “I’m home!” While weeping. Somewhere, something in me is in pain. I just can’t pin this it to one thing. This is my way of finding healing. I’m big on materiality and this show is a deeper exploration of ingxowa. It’s also me allowing myself to have fun. You’ll see that translation of scale, the movement between smaller and larger works, sculpture, and you’ll feel the stretch of my growth. Growth as an artist, as a creative person, and just as a human being, learning and unlearning. This show carries that energy of experimentation and expansion. In an interview For most of my life, Gqal’emgqubeni (Gqomgqayi, Chananatu) was the clan name I knew. Only recently, through research, did I discover that the correct form is Gqele ’emgqubeni. That small shift opened a whole world for me. I’ve spent years researching my people’s history, and I’m deeply troubled by the erasure of Black history — the gaps, distortions and silences that shape how we understand ourselves. That’s why this project sits so close to my heart. The loss of accurate records created a huge displacement for many of us. So Gqal’emgqubeni speaks directly to that search for my ancestral home, but it also speaks to how we, as Black people, dig into our histories and our knowledge systems. It’s about the distance between how our ancestors lived and how we live now. The show lives in that in-between — the pain, the dislocation and the grey space of what hasn’t been fully told or remembered. In an interview Once I know what needs to be done, that part becomes the easiest, because then it’s time for my team and me to sit down and embroider. As time-consuming as it is, that’s the grounded, predictable part. The hardest part is always the conceptualisation. It’s a whole emotional cycle: searching for the idea (which can arrive in different ways), getting excited and thinking it’s brilliant, then hitting the phase of doubt and frustration and finally pushing through with grit. If you’re impatient or under pressure, frustration will get the better of you. You really have to allow the idea to take shape in its own time. In an interview I can only speak for myself. Just like there’s no single rule when it comes to spirituality, there’s no single rule when it comes to abstraction. For me, abstraction is freedom. It allows me to speak to memory, to feeling, to spirit, without being boxed in by literal representation. It lets me honour what is present even when it can’t be named. I use art as a way of knowing who I am and where I come from. My sculptures are based on miniature objects that you'd find everyday at home, but I enlarge them: for example, matchsticks which I enlarge. Or like the safety pendant, where I also incorporate beadwork. Each piece tells a story. My love of art started from around 11-years-old when I started drawing from a child's perspective. My work speaks to heavy subjects, but showcased in a very playful way, which sort of eases a lot of things. Throughout my undergrad I was making work about the history of this country and that of my family: about trauma and violence, which started to feel very heavy on me. So I started adopting this approach. If you can say something that a five-year-old child can understand, then you have achieved something. It's always been like that, I remember I made this piece with plastic plates, from afar, you'd think they were smarties, but when you come closer, it had all these surnames - speaking of collective and speaking of community, and I like that effect, of drawing people in and grabbing their attention. I also enjoy borrowing from my culture. Colour is important in my work. I'm always investigating and curious about colour: rearranging, curating it in a way that will speak of a mood. There’s the sculpture and there's the paintings on paper. And there's also performance. It’s like a puzzle that one day, hopefully, everything will come together. I'm very patient with my journey and very patient and understanding that it's coming in small pieces. And it's at the same time it’s also for me to understand myself in this world. She describes her work At first, when I started off, I was just using what I could find on campus. Born from necessity, I initially lacked the equipment I needed; but now, it’s become more than that. Things that were loved before and were used in a different context, and I'm just trying to glue in the life that it had before. It could be something that I find when I'm at home; materials like paper, flour, rice, or objects that I find in my backyard, or when I'm walking, like say, potato sacks. All these things I just find interesting. Materiality is quite a big thing, it's an investigation, a curiosity. And sometimes I don't have a plan of what to do with that material. So it becomes a discovery in a way, just going about the world, and you're just discovering things, and you add into your life and it into your work. The significance of repurposing materials Intuition teaches one to listen. We’re surrounded by a lot of noise and constantly busy, so it’s hard to be able to honestly get what that intuition is saying. I just walk into something and I'm like, okay, what next? I listen to what my intuition tells me. And that's why sometimes the artwork itself tells me what to do, because it's that intuition. It's that voice that is like, okay, this is what you're doing. I'm just here as a vessel. She spoke on Intuition I like referring back, because it helps me understand my thought process back then, and how it has changed, and how I have gotten to a point where I understand other people's perspectives. If I speak of time, in a decolonial sense, I step into a very spiritual platform, when I speak of time, it becomes a different thing. There is no right or wrong. Things will happen. It's like nature. It takes time for me to understand all of these ideas that I have. It's like working with a chisel and a board, trying to master or shape it in a way. I'm spending a lot of time trying to find a way to say what I want to say, or find a technique or find a formula that will be able to express everything that is in me. External links Category: Living people Category:Artists from South Africa Category:Women artists Category:1993 births Category:Women born in the 1990s