Setlamorago Mashilo is compelled by a sense of social conscience.

He employs the use of ‘dika le diema’ (Sepedi proverbs and idioms) into his multidisciplinary art practice, to translate the community’s oral histories into artistic interventions and installations.

Taking the baton from his earlier works, Mabu a u tswitswe, Bodulo and Landlords & Trespassers, Mashilo’s work oscillates around the ‘consequence’ of dwelling, building and thinking, often [re] interrogating and [re] articulating narratives that resonate individually and collectively about our sense of loss, nostalgia and inherited memories.

His work becomes a form of conversation about the values of our societies; how they are deeply encoded in our language and the objects that are derived from them and, ultimately, how that extrapolates into the communities we grow up in.

While land is a dominant topic in South Africa’s conversations right now, it’s something that has featured – in different forms – in Mashilo’s work for years.

See more of his work here.

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