Mohau Modisakeng was born in Soweto in 1986 and lives and works between Johannesburg and Cape Town. He completed his undergraduate degree at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town in 2009 and worked towards a Master’s degree at the same institution. His work engages race, the militarization of society and the deep divides of post-apartheid South Africa and the post-colonial continent. He interrogates the collective narratives that inform our experience of the world, in particular those that evoke the black body as a site of fragmentation and distortion.

Modisakeng was awarded the Sasol New Signatures Award in 2011. He has exhibited at VOLTA NY, New York (2014); the Saatchi Gallery, London (2012); Dak’Art Biennale, Dakar (2012); Focus 11, Basel (2011); and Stevenson, Cape Town (2010). In 2013 he produced an ambitious new video work in association with Samsung as a special project for the 2013 FNB Joburg Art Fair. His work is part of public collections such as the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town and the Saatchi Gallery, London as well as in prominent private collections such as Zeitz MOCAA.

Works

No Serenity, 2019

No Serenity, Mohau Modisakeng, Single channel video 4´09´´, 2019

Material, metaphor and the black body are the tools that Mohau Modisakeng uses to explore the influence of South Africa’s violent history – a history that remains ignored in contemporary society – on how we understand our cultural, political and social roles as human beings in post-colonial Africa and, in particular, post-apartheid South Africa.

Working with film, large-scale photographic prints, installations and performances, Moisakeng’s “work doesn’t start off with an attempt to portray violence, but it becomes mesmerising because although we might recognise history as our past, the body is indifferent to social changes, so it remembers.”