Siwa Mgoboza, born 1993 in Cape Town, holds a BA Fine Art from Michaelis School of Fine Art, UCT.

Having been raised abroad for most of his life, the work of Mgoboza deals with the exploration of the globalized African sense of self, a Western upbringing and the liminal  space where these identities exist.

Mgoboza was awarded the Eduard Louis Laden Art Bursary in 2015, he was also awarded the Cecil Skotnes Award for most promising art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art. He has also been nominated for ‘Young + African Visual Artist of the Year’ by Creative Nestlings.
He currently lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.

Mgoboza’s photographic constructs manifest his ‘post-post-colonial’ world called AFRICARDIA. He has imagined this future land’s physical landscape, its inhabitants and animal-life.
Here nature and humans live side by side peacefully, the world of difference does not exist and hybridity is taken to new levels of boundless subjectivity. Mgoboza’s frenetic compositions are a reflection on what it would be like if a cosmic clash occurred and beings of AFRICARDIA were teleported to our current reality.

The work of Mgoboza projects Africa in a positive light and seeks to reclaim and assert the position of Africa and its people, after all we were once upon a time Kings and Queens.
The use of Isishweshwe is instrumental. This well-known fabric has a loaded history: of trade and cultural interchanges across the continent; of indigenisation, cultural revitalisation and re-appropriation.

The history of wax printed material is a history of colonial trade that saw material culture trafficked through imperial powers to their colonised subjects.
However, today, the fabric is worn with much pride and not only by black South Africa. The material speaks of the colonial trade route whose conclusion is integral to a particular sense of African identity after liberation from colonial authority.

See more of his work here.
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