Senzeni Marasela (South Africa 1977-)
Ixesha

red cotton thread on cotton

Artwork date: 2021
Signature details: each embroidered with the artist's initials and dated bottom right
Exhibited: Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, 'Senzeni Marasela, Waiting for Gebane', 19 June to 4 September 2022.
Ziets Mocaa, Cape Town, 'Waiting for Gebane', 18 December 2020 to 2 May 2021.
Exchange Rates*: USD 14 398 – 16 798
GBP 10 793 – 12 592
EURO 12 401 – 14 468

(11)

45 x 45 cm unframed each

Provenance:

Private collection, Johannesburg.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

Embroidery lies at the heart of Senzeni Marasela’s practice, functioning not only as a material technique but as a symbolic language through which memory, history, and personal and collective narratives are made visible. In her hands, thread acts as a form of connective tissue; between generations, between absence and presence, and between the body and memory. The embroidered surfaces carry a tactile intimacy, evoking sutured wounds, mended histories, and forgotten narratives carefully held together. Through the slow, deliberate labour of stitching, Marasela transforms a historically marginalised form of labour into a powerful vehicle for resistance and remembrance.

Colour also functions symbolically and the presence of red throughout Marasela’s practice has become a consistent visual and conceptual thread. The colour is closely tied to the idea of the ‘red dust’, which refers both to the dry red earth and dust storms associated with parts of rural South Africa. It also refers to the movements of men conscripted into war or drawn to Johannesburg’s mines in the 1930s and 1940s. Red becomes a marker of the landscapes, labour routes, and material traces left by these forced and economically driven migrations.

For the artist, the use of red carries both personal and historical meaning. It connects to stories passed down through her family, particularly her grandmother’s recollections of environmental hardship in rural areas where conditions of instability and limited formal record-keeping contributed to uncertainty surrounding the exact date of her father’s birth. The dust becomes a metaphor for obscured histories and fragmented memory, for lives and experiences that were never properly recorded or acknowledged. Red therefore operates not only as a colour, but as a marker of absence, loss, and historical erasure.

Red is also closely associated with the figure of Theodora, a recurring alter ego and symbolic protagonist in her work, through whom the artist explores the lived experiences of Black women within both historical and contemporary contexts. In the Ixesha series, Theodora is physically embroidered onto the textile surfaces, becoming both a visual and symbolic presence within the works. Through Theodora, the artist seeks to recover and reimagine obscured narratives by drawing on oral histories, family memory, archival fragments, and personal testimony.

Marasela’s use of embroidery and hand-stitching becomes particularly significant in this process, functioning as a slow and intimate act of repair through which forgotten stories are materially reconstructed and given visibility. This practice is also deeply rooted in her family history: her grandmother learned embroidery as a way of avoiding hard physical labour, and the skill was then passed down to her daughter and ultimately to Marasela herself, becoming both a line of familial inheritance and a foundational element of her artistic language.

The isiXhosa word “Ixesha,” meaning “time”, becomes both a conceptual and emotional framework through which Marasela examines memory, ritual, and the passage of time. This idea is made tangible through recurring visual motifs that anchor time in both symbolic and lived experience. Birds of prey, such as the owl, eagle, and vulture, appear as figures of watchfulness, suggesting a heightened awareness of time as something observed, anticipated, and taken, much like a predator tracking its movement with precision and anticipation. Alongside this, the image of a clock fixed at two o’clock operates as a literal and grounded marker of time, referring to the exact time when the bus departs from the village to Johannesburg. This moment carries a sense of urgency and consequence, as missing the bus means waiting until the following day, underscoring how time is shaped not only by abstraction, but also by the constraints of movement, access, and survival.

What makes the Ixesha series particularly compelling is the tension it holds between fragility and endurance. The works appear delicate and intimate, yet conceptually they carry immense historical and emotional weight. Through the slow and meditative language of embroidery, Marasela positions textile not as craft alone, but as site of historical reckoning, cultural preservation, and Black feminist resistance.

COLLECTOR'S NOTE

• Marasela is currently presenting an installation in the Arsenale as part of the 61^st International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, In Minor Keys, curated by the late Koyo Kouoh.

• In 2023 Marasela became the first recipient of the exciting new K21 Global Art Prize in Dusseldorf, Germany.

• A retrospective of Marasela’s work, Waiting for Gebane, was shown at the Zeitz MOCCA in Cape Town in 2021.

• Notable local and international solo exhibitions include I write (stitch) what I like, Bode, Berlin (2024); New traditions: Louise McCagg & Senzeni Marasela, A.I.R. Gallery, New York, USA (2011); Oh my God you look like shit. Who let you out of the house looking like that?, Sternersen Museum, Oslo, Norway (2009); JONGA: Look at Me – Museum of Women, Dolls and Memories, Deveron Projects, Huntly, UK (2009)

• Notable local and international group exhibitions include Empowerment, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Denmark (2022); The Power of My Hands, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Paris, France (2021); Witness: Afro Perspectives from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, El Espacio 23, Miami, USA (2020); Sous le fil, Les Abattoirs, Toulouse, France (2020); Alpha Crucis, Contemporary African Art, Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo, Norway (2020); Paris Photo, Grand Palais, Paris, France (2019); Yesterday is Today’s Memory, Espace Commines, Paris, France (2019); I am… Contemporary Women Artists of Africa, The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, USA (2019).

• The artist was also included in the South African Pavilion at the 56^th Venice Biennale in 2015.

COLLECTIONS:

The artist is represented in numerous local and international collections, notably, the Newark Museum collection, Smithsonian Institution, USA; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Leridon Collection, Paris, Harry David collection, Athens and the Sindika Dokolo collection, Angola.