Buhlebezwe Siwani is an artist, activist, iNyanga (traditional healer) and iSangoma (diviner) whose aesthetic, political and socio-spiritual responsibilities work in concert and conversation across her practice. Across photography, video, performance, sculpture and experimental painting, her works manifest historical reflections, political gestures and healing prescriptions.
Siwani’s work in the 2026 Biennale Arte addresses Black womanhood in dialogue with the Renaissance, histories of coloniality and apartheid and the contemporary South African context. The five-channel video installation Amagugu presents six Black women, nude and adorned with bright protea and strelitzia flowers, as well as dried imphepho, an incense employed in divination and healing. The women, including Siwani herself, appear in deep chiaroscuro, appropriating a western visual paradigm to depict the Black female body.
The sculptures Zanenkosi and Ilifa lakhe are made using soap in the green colour of a brand immediately familiar to South African low-income households. This signifier of inequality is used to represent an overlooked subject: the pregnant woman. Conveying pregnancy as a state of slow gravity, the works insist on both the profundity and mundanity of motherhood. In the abstract painting Izintaba, soap functions as the staining pigment, further scrambling the material’s associations. Applying these methods to Black femininity, Siwani articulates a social and political argument about perception and expectation.
—Same Mdluli
