Mawande Ka Zenzile

Mawande Ka Zenzile was born in 1986 in Icacadu (formerly Lady Frere), Eastern Cape, South Africa. He currently lives and works in Cape Town.

Ka Zenzile is a versatile artist. His practice has always been multidisciplinary from the onset — his work explores sculpture, painting, new media, drawing, and performance from earlier in his career.

Ka Zenzile received his MA Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town in 2019, following his BA Fine Art from the same institution in 2014. He also studied at the Ruth Prowse School of Art in 2007.

His work is characterized by the use of cow dung as both motif and material — a substance also used for healing in isiXhosa and other African traditions. Through this distinctive medium, Ka Zenzile explores themes of heritage, spirituality, epistemology, cosmology, and identity, integrating traditional and contemporary approaches to painting. In order to deal with or balance dualities imposed by colonization, he coined the term Archetypocalypse as a philosophical and epistemological framework — a means of negating the limitations and projections imposed on African visualities.

Ka Zenzile was among three artists selected for the South African Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, curated by Nomusa Makhubu and Nkule Mabaso under the title The Stronger We Become. He is featured in Prime: Art's Next Generation (Phaidon, 2021), an anthology of rising stars in contemporary art.