Buhlebezwe Siwani

Buhlebezwe Siwani (b. 1987, Johannesburg) works with performance, photography, sculpture and installation. Siwani’s work interrogates the patriarchal framing of the black female body and black female experience within the South African context. As an initiated Sangoma, a spiritual healer that works within the space of the death and the living, Siwani focused her artistic practice into rituality and the relationship between Christianity and African spirituality. Central to her work is her own body, which operates in multiple registers as subject, object, form, medium, material, language and site. Her work can be described, although not literally, as the documentation of a diverse set of performances, which are rendered through video, photography, sculpture, installation and works on paper.

Each of her projects deals with the relationship between ancestral rituals and modern life, touching social and political topics, such as the female body, black communities, histories of colonization and the paradoxes of our contemporary society, all seen through the filter of the artist’s own biography and experience.

Buhlebezwe Siwani was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1987 and currently lives and works between Cape Town and Amsterdam.

She completed her BAFA at the Wits School of Arts in Johannesburg in 2011 and her MFA at the Michealis School of Fine Arts in 2015.

Buhlebezwe Siwani was the winner of the 2021 Standard Bank Young Artists Awards in the category of Visual Arts.