---
title: Thuthukani Myeza
description: I am what my ancestors never dreamed
url: "https://www.artsume.com/a/thuthukani-myeza"
type: artist
createdAt: 2026-04-13
updatedAt: 2026-04-14
disciplines:
  - Collage
  - Video Art
  - Augmented Reality
location: "Cape Town, WC, South Africa"
birthYear: 1996
---

# Thuthukani Myeza

*I am what my ancestors never dreamed | Collage, Video Art, Augmented Reality | Based in Cape Town, WC, South Africa*

## 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.


## Biography

Thuthukani Myeza (b. 1996, Johannesburg, South Africa) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice centres on collage, archival imagery, and text as tools for exploring intimacy, memory, and survival within Black histories. Raised in Welvenkop, Mpumalanga, and later based in Johannesburg, his work is shaped by lived experience across rural and urban South African contexts, as well as a sustained engagement with African and diasporic memory.







## Curriculum Vitae

### Solo Exhibitions

- **2022** - "How To be Black for Begginers ," AVA Gallery Cape Town (Curated by Thuthukani Myeza)

### Group Exhibitions

- **2025** - "Tswane Art Fair," august house Pretoria
- **2022** - "Desired Lines," Affinity Art Gallery Lagos (Curated by Affinity Art Gallery)

## Portfolio

### Nomba kuthini (2026)

*Mixed Media*

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### Elswhere 1 (2026)

*Mixed Media*

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### Where is Velilie? (2026)

*Mixed Media*

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### Have you not seen Velilie (2026)

*Mixed Media*

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### Have you seen Velilie? (2026)

*Mixed Media*