With Ngiyiboneleni?, Smiso Cele invites audiences into a space where memory, repetition, and intimacy converge

The Bag Factory Artists’ Studios in Newtown opens its doors to Ngiyiboneleni?, a solo exhibition by Johannesburg-based visual artist Smiso Cele, following his completion of the prestigious Cassirer Welz Award 2025 residency. Running from 13 November 2025 to late January 2026, the exhibition extends Cele’s ongoing project Ebhuqwini (2024), weaving together themes of intimacy, repetition, and the fragile comforts of memory.

Born in Port Shepstone, KwaZulu-Natal, Smiso Cele has steadily carved a reputation as one of South Africa’s most compelling emerging voices. His practice engages ecological questions around migration, gardening, urban planning, and language, often expressed through diagrammatic drawings and object-based sculptures.

Cele’s accolades include winning the Cassirer Welz Award 2025, with previous exhibitions such as Shifting Grounds (Ellis House Gallery, 2025), AFFECT/EFFECT (UJ FADA Gallery, 2024), and Of Place and the Uncertain (Constitutional Hill, 2024). His residencies span the Bag Factory (Young & Unframed), Nirox Foundation’s Kromdraai Impact Hub, and Ellis House.

At the heart of Ngiyiboneleni? lies a deceptively simple object: the bread clip. For Cele, this everyday item becomes a vessel of longing and familiarity, recalling childhood gestures of chewing or repurposing it as a toothpick. In his hands, the bread clip transforms into a metaphor for persistence, repetition, and the search for warmth in unfamiliar spaces. It is a tactile reminder of home, echoing the intimacy of the bedroom he once shared with his siblings, a space that doubled as storage yet brimmed with relational meaning.

The exhibition title itself, Ngiyiboneleni?, is drawn from a phrase used by Cele’s mother to describe an uncontrollable desire to overuse or overindulge in something rare. Here, the phrase becomes a lens through which the artist interrogates the ways objects soothe, anchor, and complicate our relationship to place. Cele’s work builds an intimate dialogue between the self, the environment, and the objects that tether us to memory.