Selloane Moeti

This year's featured artist is award-winning painter and performer Selloane Moeti, whose powerful dreamscapes present figures of womxn infused with symbols of both popular culture and esoteric knowledge.

Selloane Moeti, Untitled, 2017

It Ends
With Me

Artist: Selloane Moeti
Curator: Londi Modiko

In Selloane Moeti’s first solo show, It Ends With Me, she presents a body of work that draws on links between cleansing, healing, dislocation and relocation. Her paintings are an attempt to trace and understand her lineage as a moSotho womxn born, raised and still living in KwaZulu-Natal. In her work, Moeti brings together an assortment of cultural references, including but not limited to her own seSotho modality. The stylised figures of womxn from her dreamscapes infuse popular culture and symbols that explore notions of esoteric knowledge.

The focal point of Moeti’s works are faces disguised by ubomvu or red clay. This natural material cannot be controlled, it cracks and takes on a different eerie yet beautiful form once dry. The ‘clay faces’ crack and develop wrinkles, which then look like the faces of old wise womxn, a metaphor for her ancestors. The red clay paste is known as letsoku in Sotho culture and ibomvu among Nguni (Zulu) people, is used by both womxn and men in traditional ceremonies aimed at connecting or conversing with ancestors. Moeti’s process is a form of catharsis that results in artworks that are a collective connection of dreams. All of this connects to the womxn in her family, including her late grandmother who had a spiritual gift of healing through prayer and her mother who has a gift of premonitions through dreams. Moeti’s paintings are an attempt to heal herself and to regain the power of healing others, as her grandmother and mother were/are able to. In her work ibomvu becomes a representation of spiritual and physical purification. 

Selloane
Moeti

Selloane Moeti (b. 1984, KwaZulu Natal eMagabheni, South Africa) is a painter and a performance artist. She studied Fine Art at Durban University of Technology. She is winner of the 2018 KZN Young Achiever Award in the Visual Arts category in the eThekwini Municipality, was awarded the 2019 1st Prize at the KZNSA members exhibition, judged by world renowned independent curator Gabi Ngcobo. She runs figure drawing and conceptual development sessions for youth and kids in Durban and recently appointed as Art Director for NGO Rural Youth Development Foundation SA.