September 26, 2025 - October 16, 2025
274 Preller Street, Muckleneuk
Thresholds of Knowledge Thresholds of Knowledge, curated by Prof. Nombeko Mpako, is a multidisciplinary exhibition held at the UNISA Art Gallery in fulfillment of the Master's and Doctoral Program of the Department of Art and Music.
Thresholds of Knowledge integrates implicit, codified, and tacit knowledge through the linking of numerous artistic bodies of work by Master's and Doctoral candidates: Sango Filita, Wadzanai Tirimboyi, Bongani Ntombela, Karabo Aphane, and Reinhard Sonntag. From fine art to film, installation, sculpture, and performance, the exhibition references notions of commemoration, disruptions of contemporary trends in cinematic culture, encounters between art and science, and philosophies of resistance while observing the culture of migration on the African continent. The exhibition connects various artistic interpretations while interrogating historical archetypes and paradigm shifts by noting altered topical issues and observing detailed fragments of wide-ranging subject matter.
The term "thresholds" in this exhibition represents distinct points of entry into critical junctures in learning, where transformation is presented as a shift in the modality of knowledge and understanding through the observation of core ideas in media, politics, memory, epistemic violence, passage, and the Anthropocene. The crossing of the threshold suggests a deeper, more flexible comprehension of existing ideologies while developing progressive, illustrious visual interpretations.
The exhibition Thresholds of Knowledge further employs the use of indigenous languages as a dynamic system, transferring unique intrinsic knowledge by actively transforming exhibited artworks into sites of dialogue as they echo diverse notions of various lived experiences. The artists craftily explore concepts through the applied arts and performance, proposing a radical conveyance in the modes of science, movement, corruption, violence, and the systematic setting of South Africa's political and socio-economic landscape.
Through interactive artistic installations, we are presented with informed perspectives that embrace the historical and emotional significance of presence while illuminating the duality of existence. Centering moments of conception relative to our experiences and integrating evolving attitudes toward a post-colonial and post-African understanding, the exhibition Thresholds of Knowledge adopts an inquisitive mindset that fosters action, growth, and development through deep-seated interventions, further advocating for a reimagination and reprocessing of contentious concepts in social culture.
SANGO FILITA
UMBULELO ONGAZENZISIYO (2025)
The exhibition entitled “Umbulelo Ongazenzisiyo”, meaning thanksgiving with deepest gratitude, is drawn from the Xhosa word for expressing appreciation and gratitude. In Xhosa culture, Umbulelo is an act of appreciation and often marks life’s journey and significant achievements. Although it is not always in all formal cultural thanksgiving ceremonies, Umbulelo in Xhosa culture often includes traditional elements such as spiritual blood ritual, in which the thanksgiving is marked by the sacrifice of livestock, the brewing of traditional beer and celebration. It is usually a communal event, open to all, and shaped by each family’s means. While it may appear ceremonial, its deeper meaning lies in the ancestral communication and spiritual gratitude it embodies.
This exhibition adopts the concept of Umbulelo Ongazenzisiyo as a way of giving thanks and honouring those who played vital roles in South Africa’s political struggles, with a specific focus on black heroes and heroines from the Eastern Cape. The project seeks to commemorate individuals who, in the researcher’s view, have not received the recognition they deserve post-1994. At the heart of this exhibition are two key historical figures: Enoch Mgijima and Nongqawuse. Both are remembered for their prophecies and spiritual leadership, even though without hullabaloo. Their efforts were aimed at protecting the Xhosa people from colonial ideologies and the systematic dispossession of land and cattle. While their prophecies were widely doubted or even hijacked to the detriment of their people, the case of Nongqawuse during their time, this exhibition recognises their resistance and the spiritual dimensions of their leadership. They are honoured here as symbols of cultural defiance and resilience. The medium chosen for this commemoration includes postage stamps, once a powerful tool of communication and now a relic of the past. These stamps often featured romanticised images of Xhosa life, selectively showcasing only the pleasant aspects of daily activities. They carried both practical and symbolic value, just like the individuals being commemorated in this exhibition. Over time, as digital communication emerged, stamps lost their utility but gained historical and emotional significance. This transformation mirrors how society has undervalued and forgotten some of its own leaders. By repurposing stamps as a medium, the exhibition reveals untold and undocumented stories and narratives overlooked by mainstream media and historical discourses. These visual reinterpretations offer a space to reflect, honour, and preserve memory.
Some of the works in this exhibition may be emotionally challenging or even unsettling. This discomfort reflects the experience of the artist-researcher during site visits and fieldwork. It is not intended to offend, but to awaken a deeper appreciation of where we come from, and a renewed gratitude for those who carried the burden of the struggle, whether politically or spiritually. Although stamps are no longer in active use, they remain preserved and valuable, much like the heroes we remember in Umbulelo Ongazenzisiyo. May this exhibition serve not only as a tribute but as a call to restore value to those whose sacrifices made our present possible.
WADZANAI TIRIMBOYI
MUTORWA ASI (2025)
There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonise the moon, and others dance before it as an ancient friend. — James Baldwin, 1972
The exhibition ‘Mutorwa Asi’, 2025, meaning “But a Foreigner” is a body of work that relays the radical transformation and contends a need for a fresh African perspective that embraces the evolving attitudes towards post-Africanism and adopts a more receptive mindset that fosters agency, acceptance, innovation, progress, and development. According to Hall, cultural identity is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as ‘being’; hence, the artist identifies with being and becoming, a voice that can never be silenced. Taking ownership to practically think through art and cultural production.
In this exhibition, the artist used the historical and current emigrants' lived experiences to think through the production of the work’s narrative. The work titled ‘Mutorwa Asi’ reflects dual moments: the ugly and beautiful, and not quite here nor there, daily uncertainties of being topical. A reflection of untold pain, burden and successes in the mind of the artist as she decides to have agency and tell the story of herself and other fellow artists in Diaspora. The body of work uses deconstruction and construction techniques, and metaphoric installation language to re-imagine, re-process and re-universalise art and cultural representation in migration.
The artist evokes historic manifestations, current scenarios and possible universalities of art and cultural expressions to foreground overlooked beauties, unrepresented voices of those dealing with colonial overload, emigration crisis, literal and metaphoric trauma and how to be and become beyond crude and subtle boundaries in societies. To transcend life challenges, the voices beam across the void of alienation and the crackle of a conflicted society. This body of work exhibits the marginalized, excluded and oppressed voices erased by the dominant nucleus. In the quest for greener pastures, the artist is in-between spaces and in a place, playing multiple roles. This multiplicity and overlap is often a resemblance of migrants as they navigate through life away from home.
The artist's creation, once a student migrant, now an economic one, is shaped by her daily encounters. The body of work is an installation that depicts liminality with agency and authority, a visual narrative to tell historic, current and possible mutations. The concept and method of being and becoming, though lost in the emigration chaos, simultaneously depict embracing both the negatives and positives at once towards a celebration of being different and taking power in an uneven society. This exhibition is grounded in a deep belief in artists as the vital creators and interpreters of the societal ecosystem and catalyst for possibilities. It proposes a radical reconnection with art’s creations and role in society: that is, the emotional, the visual, the sensory, the affective and the subjective. The exhibition is built on universes of imagination, whose practices seamlessly bleed into society, accommodating daily life as part of a logical and aesthetically consistent relation of parts. Artists who are exceedingly generous and hospitable to life, acknowledging complexities of Africa’s past, present and future in a globalised world
Look at the creole garden, you put all species on such a little lick of land: avocados, lemons, yams, sugarcanes …plus thirty or forty other species on this bit of land that doesn’t go more than fifty feet up the side of the hill, they protect each other. In the great Circle, everything is in everything else (Édouard Glissant, 1993)
KARABO APHANE
MOKGWA WA SE SA BONAGALENG
The exhibition entitled “Mokgwa wa Se sa Bonagaleng”, translated to mean “the Nature of the Unseen”, is a critical, decolonial reimagining of violence in some of South African films and television shows. It disrupts dominant cinematic narratives by peeling off the surface to explore the deeper emotional, social, and psychological motives behind violent and immoral behaviour. Unlike mainstream portrayals that often justify or glamorise such actions from black actors, these films challenge viewers to confront the systemic and generational roots of violence, especially within marginalised and racialised communities.
Through narrative subversion, counter-storytelling, and a decolonial lens, the exhibition questions who gets to tell stories, who is humanised, and how trauma is perpetuated through visual culture. These films refuse to conform to the expectations of genre or sympathy, instead, they reveal what is often left unseen, the inner worlds, histories, and moral complexities erased by dominant storytelling frameworks. The exhibition unfolds through five short films, presented in a continuous sequence, each one beginning only after the previous has finished. Together, they form a unified narrative, and the full story can only be experienced by watching all five films in order.
As you move through the exhibition, you will encounter distinct yet interconnected stories, each revealing the emotional landscape, background, and motives of the characters. Every screening room is colour-coded, with each colour carefully chosen to reflect the emotional state and psychological depth of the character featured in that segment. Finally, this immersive journey invites viewers to not only experience the story being told but also to give their responses from their inner worlds to add to the main study’s question of the transformation to improve the moral fibre rather than just relaying negative emotions.
BONGANI NTOMBELA
DOSE OF BALLS (2025)
The exhibition "Dose of Balls" is not just a provocation, but a bold, naked, unfiltered, and unapologetic artistic intervention that confronts the crumbling moral fabric of South Africa's political and socio-economic landscape. It is not the usual toyi-toyi, Amandla Ngawethu! kind of rhetoric, but a sculptural rebellion. The one that takes the form of gigantic testicular balls of steel, symbolic of the audacity, courage, and naked truth-telling necessary to confront entrenched corruption, impunity, and systemic failure. In the tradition of politically engaged art, this exhibition interrogates the fear and complicity that have allowed decay to thrive within various institutions from the public sector. At its core, Dose of Balls is about civic audacity, a metaphorical call for South Africans to grow balls of courage required to speak out, to resist, and to hold power accountable.
South Africa's democracy has been stripped naked and bruised. Since the revelations of the Zondo Commission into State Capture and lately by KZN Commissioner, General Mkhwanazi, society has witnessed not just the scale of corruption, but the deadly silencing of those who dared to expose it. Figures such as Babita Deokaran, a whistleblower assassinated in 2021 after exposing corruption in the Gauteng Department of Health, serve as haunting reminders of the cost of having the balls to speak out on the lack of integrity in the public sector.
South African history is not short of human experiences on political conflicts, human rights resistance, labour protest, liberation struggles, and power structures and relations that have been practised through governments, public institutions, organisations, or systems. This exhibition is deeply rooted in the philosophy of resistance, drawing from Michel Foucault's conception of power. It presents itself as “forms of resistance” through satire, performance art and nudity, resisting against “different forms of power” as a result of corruption. Foucault speaks of power not as a fixed possession of the elite, but as a pervasive force embedded in everyday institutions and relationships. This exhibition challenges these power networks by inviting spectators to see how state power disciplines, through surveillance, eliminates dissent under the guise of order.
Through Interactive artistic installations, viewers’ voices will be provoked and amplified as part of a broader activist dialogue, making the exhibition both the stimulus and site of inquiry. These testimonies will serve as first-person narratives capturing lived experience and emotional truth, informing the main results, which will be documented and interpreted as a response to the aims, objectives and arguments of the study. Finally, the exhibition borrows from the satirical sharpness of Brett Murray, the resistance of Zapiro, and the truth-telling audacity of Zanele Muholi, not in imitation but in solidarity. Thus, Dose of Balls is not a safe space, but a defiant one asking viewers not to stand as passive spectators but to feel implicated, stirred, and uncomfortable, because silence is complicity.
Man up and take a dose of balls
REINHARDT SONNTAG
COMPLEX ENCOUNTERS (2025)
In the present geological age, the Anthropocene, we have reached a place of dominance in which we as humans influence the geological processes of our planet. This forces us to recognise that we share the same natural environment with all the other species that inhabit the earth. Our dominance on the planet has reached a point where we are confronted by the negative effects of our geological agency. We have to creatively forge new mutually beneficial relationships with our nonhuman others. In this context, I engage with scientific discourses relating to environmental sustainability and the complex molecular makeup of inorganic and living matter.
In Complex Encounters (2025), I probe an intellectual over-emphasis of linearity, hierarchy, solidity, and identity in the established sciences, and engage with nonlinear, non-hierarchical, fluid, and complexity-oriented thinking that challenges established scientific assumptions and introduces new scientific identities. This engagement translates into encounters between art and science that are visually embodied in the installation. The engagement is playful: I allow myself the poetic licence that creative play offers to deviate from scientific rules and imagine new structures and processes. Play also enables me to parody the traditional conceptual alignment of science with work and art with play through the labour-intensiveness of the installation.
The current installation is thematically and conceptually related to Emergent Systems (2023), which is represented in the current exhibition by a maquette (Emergent Systems: Maquette 2022). Emergent Systems (2023) engages with issues of environmental sustainability, higher education, play and playfulness, and the relationship between art and science. In it, we find our natural and cultural environment threatened and our scientific assumptions challenged by complex organic systems and viral structures that invade and infect three pillars in the entrance of a university building.
The invasion metaphor is continued in Complex Encounters (2025), which is inspired by my curiosity about the basic building blocks of matter and life. In the form of complex modular structures, they wind their way into the gallery space. They model the atoms, molecules, proteins, and cells that constitute nature and culture. They fold, divide, and connect at microscale and nanoscale, organising themselves towards higher scales into emergent complex systems. Building blocks of matter emerge as the chemical elements, which combine into all the different forms of matter that constitute our universe. They are represented by nine modular sculptures constructed from thin flat metal bars of mild steel (representing the element iron Fe), aluminium (Al), brass (representing copper Cu and zinc Zn), and copper. These elements serve as a metaphor of the pseudo-scientific attempts of the ancient alchemists to transmute base metals into gold. They also allude to modern disciplines such as chemistry and physics, which have progressed to a point where elements can, in fact, be transmuted by means of nuclear and thermonuclear processes. One work (Molecular Twisting Units), constructed from aluminium bars and pharmacy blister pack cutouts, presents a contemporary twist (pun intended) to the transmutation process: it adds plastic as an object of transmutation, referencing recycling.
The modular compounds that constitute the installation also reference the building blocks of life. In disciplines such as biochemistry and microbiology, these building blocks may emerge as biological organs and organisms. They are represented in this installation by the same material that represents the building blocks of matter: metal bars. Accordingly, the processes used to create the metal structures mimic the way life assembles itself from one type of building block: proteins. My objective is to create an experience of organic growth and becoming that challenges scientific notions of established identity as reflected in the linear and hierarchical architecture of the gallery. The complex suspended and free-standing structures are meant to reference the primordial structures of matter and life. Their multiplicity, connectedness, and nonlinearity become my visual means of pointing towards a new way of perceiving and constructing our spatial and epistemological reality.
