ABONGILE SIDZUMO

Abongile Sidzumo was born in 1996 in Cape Town, where he currently lives and works. He completed his degree in Fine Arts at the Michaelis School of Fine Arts in 2019. Sidzumo works with leather offcuts and repurposed materials to create works that reflect and interrogate humanity, the way we co-exist and our relationship with nature; he revisits memories and connects them to spaces he has lived in as well as the everyday life of marginalised communities.

Leather is often associated with luxury, wealth and power. Through his process of restitching and weaving this precious material, Sidzumo proposes that we start thinking about repurposed materials in a different way. Connecting it to notions of trauma that has been inflicted on black communities during apartheid, his practice also functions as a manner of interrogating the continuous healing of black communities in post-apartheid South Africa.

Sidzumo received the Blessing Ngobeni Art Prize, which afforded him a solo exhibition entitled Dancing in the Dust at Everard Read Gallery in Johannesburg in 2020. In the same year, he was the runner-up for the Cassirer Welz Award, hosted by Strauss & Co Auctioneers.