The Melrose Gallery is pleased to present Hlukanisa, uHlanganise, a group exhibition curated by Mpumi Mayisa, opening on 13 April 2025.

Hlukanisa uHlanganise – In Conversation with Dr Esther Mahlangu

Curated by Mpumi Mayisa

Exhibition Dates: 13 April 2025 – 23 May 2025

Exhibition Venue: The Melrose Gallery, Melrose Arch Johannesburg

The exhibition brings together works by Dr. Esther Mahlangu, Charity Vilakazi, Tinyiko Makwakwa, Nikiwe Dlova, Puleng Mongale, and Nwabisa Ntlokwana. Artists whose practices unravel, reconstruct, and extend matrilineal transmissions through material and conceptual interventions. The show includes paintings, sculpture, textiles, photography, and digital media.

The title, Hlukanisa, uHlanganise, which translates to “take apart (deconstruct) in order to reconstruct/create anew,” gestures toward a curatorial premise rooted in African epistemologies, where knowledge is encoded in form, gesture, and materiality. Across generations, these artists engage with alternative modes of inscription – umgwalo (cosmic writing), hair as a cartography of lineage, ochre as a site of memory, beadwork as a language system, and garments as archival touchstones. In doing so, they resist the erasure of African knowledge systems, asserting that learning does not need to be didactic to be legitimate. Dr. Esther Mahlangu’s iconic Ndebele mural painting practice, understood as umgwalo, anchors the exhibition. She inscribes familial histories onto the surfaces of homes, using geometry and colour to construct a visual language that extends beyond aesthetics into the metaphysical. Building on this lineage, the participating artists explore acts of ukulanda – the process of fetching and retrieving ancestral knowledge – through a range of material engagements. Puleng Mongale photographs herself in garments passed down through generations, layering her own body as a way to reconstruct a lineage made absent in photographic archives. Nikiwe Dlova traces the histories of hair as a site of resistance and identity, recalling how braiding patterns once encoded pathways to freedom. She expands this further by exploring the ways shapes within hair function as communicative symbols, mapping histories and relationships onto the scalp. Charity Vilakazi works with intricate line work and ochre, referencing Zulu beadwork as a mode of storytelling, while Tinyiko Makwakwa interrogates indigenous architectural principles and their alignment with celestial rhythms. She extends this by incorporating natural dyes, reinforcing the relationship between African sciences and the earth’s organic intelligence. Nwabisa Ntlokwana’s sculptures subvert material expectations, using paper-mâché and leather to question strength, fragility, and ritual. Her works engage with the unseen, gesturing toward the ways in which language and meaning extend beyond the physical realm. Together, these artists assert that African histories have always been written; onto walls, woven into braids, shaped into clay, inscribed in ochre. Hlukanisa, uHlanganise is not a thesis of preservation alone but of continuation, where acts of remembering, reshaping, and reimagining reveal that the archive is not fixed. Instead, it is always in flux – constantly being remade in the present.

About The Melrose Gallery

The Melrose Gallery is a leading Pan African Contemporary gallery in Johannesburg, South Africa. The gallery represents established and emerging artists whose voices speak to issues of significance to the Continent of Africa globally. We are passionate about ensuring that the elders who have contributed to African Contemporary Art are recognised and continue to be heard. These inspiring stalwarts provide a stable foundation to an exciting young guard of artists swiftly emerging from the African Continent and Diaspora to establish themselves globally. We run a curated programme of exhibitions, participate in respected art fairs, support many of our artists in their participation at Biennales and conceptualise and implement significant non-commercial exhibitions in association with leading museums.

Sandi Gugushe
sandi@themelrosegallery.com
The Melrose Gallery
https://themelrosegallery.com/