Dimakatso Mathopa

This work has been kindly donated by the artist

Dimakatso Mathopa’s practice is marked by an experimentation with historical forms of printmaking, including cyanotype printing. By using this technique, she confounds the colonial use of photography and explores the inherent violence of the gaze it imposed on black subjects. Her work is concerned with a shared narrative that is specific to the displacement of black people in South Africa. More specifically, her work references her maternal grandparents’ loss of their family home and the consequential break in generational inheritance of (and connection to) land. The only remaining evidence of this family narrative is through the artist’s late-grandmother’s embodied knowledge, passed down through oral transmission.

Individual beings Relocated IV (2022) is a depiction of one of these oral narratives. The story relates to her late-grandfather's inheritance of land in the Free State from a local white man who was very fond of him. Mathopa’s late-grandfather had a wealth of knowledge in farming and served as a traditional healer for the community of Viljoenskroon. Thus, he was able to hold a position of influence in the community and had many relationships with the white people who inhabited the area which led to the gift of land bestowed upon him. In Individual beings Relocated IV, Mathopa reimagines herself in her late grandmother’s position as the matriarch of the inherited household. The cyanotype’s sepia look has been achieved by using different teas, that her late grandmother always drank in the kitchen.