Khanyi Mawhayi

Khanyisile Mawhayi is an artist, writer, and curator who has worked in multiple disciplines. Colour is an important aspect of her work for how it can evoke personal as well as cultural associations.

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For instance, her richly-coloured depictions of xibelani skirts – made with soft pastels on black backgrounds – probed the ways in which the colours of the skirts themselves were not only aesthetically compelling, but served as a means through which the artist could express her curiosity with her own Tsonga heritage.

In her most recent body of work, titled Black and White Paradise, Mawhayi has expanded her palette to include bold colours in creamy oil stick to explore more sentimental relationships between colour and emotion, or colour and memory. Colourists such as Howard Hodgkin, Chris Ofili and Katharina Grosse are major influences in this regard.

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Mawhayi cites Julie Mehretu as another source of inspiration. The way Mehretu depicts landscapes and urban scenes through metaphoric marks and signs shares a kinship with Mawhayi’s practice. Her works are abstracted, rather than abstract. Take, for example, her Midas Touch series, which saw the artist paint one gold sticker every day for one hundred days. While the resulting works are relatively simple in gesture and abstract in form, their significance is felt in their accumulation and how each ‘gold sticker’ served as a “reward for the daily work of living.” This kind of process-based approach is an important feature of Mawhayi’s practice as a whole. Drawing references from art history, music, literature, popular culture and personal experience, she sees her wider practice as a reflection on her mission toward comfortably existing in multiplicity.

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Khanyi Mawhayi was born in 1998 in Kagiso, South Africa. Growing up in Johannesburg, she holds a BFA from the University of the Witwatersrand (2020). She is currently based in Cape Town, South Africa where she is a Curatorial Assistant at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa.

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She has held two solo shows in Cape Town, namely Midas Touch at CHURCH Projects (2023) and Stage at Stevenson Gallery (2021). She has also participated in multiple group shows, including What We Know, Keyes Art Mile, Johannesburg (2023); STAGE 4, Stevenson Gallery @The Vault, Cape Town (2023); Zozimo Bulbul Black Film Festival, Rio de Janeiro (2022); Afropolis, Johannesburg (2022); Repair, The Point of Order, Johannesburg (2022); Monotypes… A Monotype Babe Experience Curatorial, Bag Factory Studios, Johannesburg (2021); Watercolor… monotypes, August House, Johannesburg (2021); Bluet, KSSO Editions, Cape Town (2021); Get up! Stand up!, Kampala Biennale, Online Exhibition (2020); as well as also also also and and and, Institute For Creative Arts, Online Exhibition (2020).