ABONGILE SIDZUMO

Abongile Sidzumo currently lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. 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.

Cattle have always been significant in the lives of rural South Africans culturally, and materially. Leather as one of the many commodities and culturally significant items produced from cows, is often associated with luxury, wealth, and power. Repurposing and recycling leather offcuts extends the use of this precious commodity that requires the sacrifice of a cow. Through his process of restitching and weaving the leather, Sidzumo proposes that we start thinking about leather’s conceptual and material value in a different way. 

Connecting leather to notions of the traumas that have 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.