Fumani Maluleke is a contemporary artist from South Africa’s Limpopo province, hailing from a marginalised village called Tsomo, in Giyani. Maluleke specialises in charcoal and pastel, and he draws inspiration from his daily life, where women and children are often central.

Born in 1991, Maluleke grew up as the second of five children in a single-parent family, where basic survival was a daily struggle. These childhood experiences shaped Maluleke’s outlook on life, and influences his artist’s gaze: “Our mothers and sisters are the ones who take care of us as children, while our fathers were not there. As a child from a marginalized village, I learned how to approach life in different ways, due to playing and sharing with other kids and appreciating what they had.”

Maluleke’s work is informed by a search for origin, for roots – a quest that must often be taken alone, as significant links in the generational chain are missing, or expressly cut away. The subjects of his pieces are seldom passive, there is a throughline of action and movement that ties the scenes together. Maluleke also holds fast to a vision of expansion and recognition for artists from rural settings, advancement which he believes will trickle back to the broader community, and specifically, the women who raised and nurture these artists: “I harbour dreams of an explosion of American and European tourists to Africa to our artworks, and thereby uplift our rural grannies, who toil day in and day out to produce the life we have here.”

Storytelling is an integral part of human existence, whether in text, verbal narration, or through the use of images as iconographic signifiers. In this solo presentation, Fumani Maluleke acts as a visual narrator where he ruminates on his encounters around the premise of land and home. The straw mat acts as a metaphorical scroll that Maluleke employs as a canvas to portray the natural scenery of his homelands and the habitual manner of being the people from Tsomo, a village in Limpopo.

Through painting scenes on a grass mat as a form of remembrance, Maluleke invites the viewer to receive a fragment of his nostalgia. The grass mat signifies more than one might think, it embodies his childhood and the life of everyone from his village. As the world advances and material culture evolves, this recollection of a once-important, irreplaceable household object allows him to grasp the authenticity his hometown has proudly preserved in its traditions for generations.