Thuthukani Myeza

Artist Statement

I work with archival imagery and contemporary text to explore intimacy, memory, and survival within Black histories. My practice is rooted in the belief that the archive is not neutral, and that tenderness can operate as a critical and political method. Drawing primarily from African and South African archives, I engage images that were often produced without care for the interior lives they depict. Through collage, layering, and fragmentation, I rework these materials to place intimacy, vulnerability, and emotional presence back into visual records shaped by colonial and apartheid logics. Rather than treating the archive as a fixed site of truth, I approach it as something living: incomplete, charged, and open to re-authorship. My interventions are not attempts to correct history, but to sit with its absences to rewrite what was omitted, spiritualise what was stripped of meaning, and create space for reflection rather than resolution. I understand my practice as a form of visual storytelling that moves slowly, allowing viewers to encounter memory not as something distant or sealed in the past, but as something that continues to shape how we love, remember, and survive in the present.