Khanya Zibaya is a multidisciplinary artist, born in a small village in the Eastern Cape. He now lives and practices in Johannesburg. Zibaya works with visual performance, experimental video work, experimental painting, sculptural, installation and photography. This also includes bodies and found objects to create contrast of realities.

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Khanya has a keen interest in people reforming their relationships with the mundane. His work reflects an ongoing fascination with the fluid, often unexamined ways in which people both shape and are shaped by systems. This dynamic fuels his drive to create in innovative ways, bringing to light the persistent, often unseen patterns that linger within the familiar.

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Through performance-based visual art, he invites people to see themselves reflected in what he terms “euphemisms of life.” By manipulating materials associated with the everyday violence of human behavior, he exposes these distortions, making visible the acts of those who perpetuate them.

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For his work, he has been recognised by the National Art Festival Student Theatre Awards for Best Actor(s) and Best Writer(s) Award, 2019; Where The Leaves Fall Magazine, London, Winner, 2023; Photo Tool 10:10, Photography Presentation Workshop, 2023 ; LagosPhoto Portfolio Review, 2023; CAP PRIZE 2024, Shortlisted; Blessing Ngobeni Art Prize,Top 8 Finalists 2024 and Void x Futures Photography 2025 shortlist.

Thero Makepe is an artist and photographer born and raised in Gaborone, Botswana, working between Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Gaborone.

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His practice is informed by past and present narratives related to his upbringing and lived experiences in Botswana and South Africa.Makepe’s work is often resolved in the form of long-form projects that contain existing public and private archival materials, such as family photos, documentary screenshots, and newspaper articles. His approach to photography also employs a variety of photographic styles, including staged portraiture, documentary photography and re-enactments.

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In 2019, he completed his Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts with distinction, majoring in photography at the Michaelis School of Fine Arts at the University of Cape Town. In 2023, he was awarded the Foam Talent Award 2024-2025, and in 2024, he received the Prince Claus Seed Award. In 2025, he was selected to be a participant in the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass.

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Makepe’s work has been exhibited at the Foam Museum in Amsterdam and the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation in Frankfurt. Public collections featuring his work include the University of Cape Town Works of Art Collection and the University of Pretoria Art Collection. He is also a founding member of the Botswana Pavilion, a collective of young artists from Botswana dedicated to advancing Botswana’s creative development and artistic heritage.

Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo (b. 1993) is a photographer based in Lawley, Johannesburg. He uses the tavern run by his parents as a studio in which to investigate themes of first-hand and generational trauma, violence and memory. Hlatshwayo was mentored by the photographer Jabulani Dhlamini and photography curator and educator John Fleetwood.

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He won the 2019 CAP Prize for Contemporary African Photography with his series Slaghuis I. His work has been featured in group exhibitions at Fotomuseum Winterthur, IAF Basel Festival, and Johannesburg’s Turbine Art Fair.

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Hlatshwayo was the Gisèle Wulfsohn Photography Mentorship Recipient for 2019. He held his first solo exhibition, Slaghuis II at the Market Photo Workshop in February 2020, and was an overall winner of the international Blurring the Lines photo award for 2020. His work will be featured at the upcoming Addis Foto Fest in December 2021.

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Lindokuhle Sobekwa (b. 1995, Katlehong, South Africa) is from a generation of South African photographers born after the first democratic elections of 1994. Through his participation in the Of Soul and Joy photography education programme in Thokoza in 2012, he realised that the medium of photography would be an essential tool to tell stories that concern and interest him.

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Sobekwa exhibited for the first time in 2013 as part of a group show in Thokoza organised by the Rubis Mécénat Foundation. His photo essay ‘Nyaope’ (2014) was published in the Mail & Guardian (South Africa), in Vice magazine’s annual Photo Issue and in the daily De Standaard (Belgium).

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In 2015, Sobekwa was awarded a scholarship to study at the Market Photo Workshop. That same year his series ‘Nyaope’ was exhibited in another group show, ‘Free From My Happiness’, organised by Rubis Mécénat for the International Photo Festival of Ghent in Belgium. The exhibition toured additional sites in Belgium and South Africa. A publication edited by Tjorven Bruyneel included a selection of works. Sobekwa was selected by the Magnum Foundation For Photography and Social Justice (NYC) to develop the project ‘I carry Her photo with Me’. In 2018 he received the Magnum Foundation Fund to continue his long-term project ‘Nyaope’. In 2021 Sobekwa completed a residency at A4 Foundation in Cape Town, culminating in a two-person exhibition with Mikhael Subotzky titled ‘Tell It to the Mountains’.

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Sobekwa opened his first museum show in 2022 at Huis Marseille in The Netherlands, featuring the body of work ‘Umkhondo: Tracing Memory’ as part of the summer programme titled ‘The beauty of the world so heavy’. His hand-made photobook, ‘I carry Her photo with Me’, was included in African Cosmologies at the FotoFest Biennial Houston in 2020, curated by Mark Sealy.

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Sobekwa’s work was shown at Goodman Gallery in March 2023 as part of the photography show ‘Against the Grain’, alongside Ernest Cole, David Goldblatt, Ruth Motau and Ming Smith. He was named an official member of Magnum Photos in 2022 and gave a lecture about his practice at TATE Modern in 2023 as part of his John Kobal Foundation Fellowship. He was also awarded the 2023 FNB Art Prize which includes a solo show at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in August 2024. His series ‘I carry Her photo with Me’ was published by Mack Books in 2024. Sobekwa was announced the 2025 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize winner, the most prestigious award for a living artist whose work has influenced international contemporary photography within the past year.

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Collections include Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography; A4 Arts Foundation; University of South Africa; Sainsbury Centre; Hessel Foundation; Rubis Mercanet; Southern Collection; First Rand Bank; Art Institute of Chicago and Johannesburg Stock Exchange.

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Santu Mofokeng was born in Johannesburg in 1956. Although starting his career as a press and documentary photographer, joining the famed photographic collective Afrapix in 1985, he would later prefer the mantel of artist. His deviation from conventional subject matter includes photographic enquiries into spirituality, the first explorations thereof resulting in the well-known series, Train Church, documenting commuter church services on the trains from Soweto to Johannesburg in 1986. This interest in the ethereal nature of spirituality continued throughout his photographic career and produced the extraordinary, evocative series Chasing Shadows.

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In his lifetime Mofokeng was the recipient of numerous awards and accolades. In 1991 he won the Ernest Cole Scholarship, to study at the International Centre for Photography in New York. He was awarded the first Mother Jones Award for Africa in 1992. In 1998 Mofokeng was the recipient of the Künstlerhaus Worpswede Fellowship and three years later of the DAAD Fellowship, both in Germany. In 2009 he was nominated as a Prince Claus Fund Laureate for Visual Arts.

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Santu Mofokeng’s international retrospective, ‘Santu Mofokeng: Chasing Shadows - Thirty Years of Photographic Essays’, opened in May 2011 at the Jeu de Paume Paris and subsequently travelled to Kunsthalle Bern in the latter part of 2011 and Bergen Kunsthall and the Wits Art Museum in Johannesburg in 2012. In May 2013 he participated in the 55th International Art Exhibition – La Biennalle di Venezia on the German Pavilion. In February 2016 it was announced that Mofokeng was the winner of the first International Photography prize established by the Fondazione Fotografia Modena.

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Santu Mofokeng was an avid reader and lover of books so it seems fitting that in May 2019 the German publisher Steidl released an 18 book box set, made in collaboration with Mofokeng, exploring his entire oeuvre as one of South Africa’s most important photographers.

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Santu Mofokeng passed away on 26 January 2020 at the age of 63.

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