Victoria Yards (VY) is fast becoming one of the most compelling urban complexes in South Africa. Joburg’s new redevelopment project is where artists have come to work, exhibit, learn and build a creative community together. Blessing Ngobeni was the first to take up a studio here in late 2016 and together with his partner, fellow artist Teresa Kutala Firmino, they have watched VY evolve as emerging artists have followed them into this calm and leafy environment. “Once I moved into my own studio, I was very happy. Most studios in Joburg are in skyscrapers. Here it doesn’t really feel like you are in the city at all. You feel a sense of peace,” says Kutala Firmino.

Kutala Firmino graduated from Wits University iin 2018 with a Masters in Fine Arts and has participated in shows including those at Museu de Historia Natural de Luanda and Mmmarthouse in Johannesburg. Her works in mixed media use collage, acrylic paint and fabric to portray figures framed by diagonal walls and flat surfaces, their playful yet confrontational gaze always firmly pointed at the viewer.

Her practise is engaged in reframing African histories and ideas of home. She was born in the military town of Pomfret, South Africa, with family roots in Angola and Congo. During her schooling she was constantly questioned about her accent, her skin colour, her hair. These memories translate into central questions around what it means to belong, what the stakes are and who is judging.

“When you are at home, you don’t think about ‘who you are’ because ‘who you are’ is all around you but as soon as you leave your comfort zone there are triggers everywhere,” Kutala Firmino explains. “During the xenophobic attacks in 2012 I found comfort in my identity book until my older sister was attacked in a taxi because she didn’t understand Zulu. The first thing they told her was to go back to where she came from. I could imagine her, as I do sometimes as well, thinking where do I go back to? We have only known South Africa as home. Angola is this distant place that some of us might never see.”

Her research into her birth town’s people investigates the importance of the individual story, whether her own family’s or people she interviews. “I am a research-based artist. Research is reading, writing, experimenting, sketching and speaking to my peers,” she explains. “I believe the past, present and future are connected. The characters in my paintings are an example of this. I source images from past, present and possible futures and place them in the same room.”

Blessing Ngobeni’s mixed media works look into similar socio-political issues and address oppression: physical and psychological. This year he won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award – the latest of many accolades across a career spanning over a decade - but his life began facing abuse and abandonment in the rural town of Tzaneen. His means were limited and he went to prison aged just 15 for armed robbery. During his time behind bars, he learnt to paint and from there, he found his role in the world would change.

“I paint the things affecting me and my people; the things causing problems around the development of our young minds,” Ngobeni says. “I look to events like when the Europeans came to steal our resources, which were supposed to serve and give food to our own people. But mostly it’s current affairs and things that matter to us right now.” He speaks of the oppression of the body, “where the capitalist wants everything from the masses, the energy that they drain from the people through the cycle of work and exploitation. The oppressive mentality from the Western world which people must submit to is what I work with.”

His paintings, which borrow from media and events within his frame of reference, are colourful and bold, often with figures stylised and abstracted. “I create a dialogue with the empty canvas to create a masterpiece. I use information and source writing through magazines, borrowing from history. I call the process bearing the works of other artists and masters. I borrow from daily ‘objects’ and take it from there.”

The artist maintains that he is here to tell his truth and wants his stories to inspire younger artists to work bravely. Going one step further, he has set up the Blessing Ngobeni Art Prize which awards one artist per year with a residency, a workshop in London and a solo show at Everard Read – the gallery both he and Kurtala Firmino are represented by. While their backgrounds – and their artworks - may be different, this couple are working in parallel to tell stories, interrogating national and personal histories and the malleable narratives around belonging that provide for some and exclude others.

Read our profile of Victoria Yards here

Read our interview with Ayanda Mabulu at Victoria Yards here

Photography Justin Keene
Words Kerri von Geusau

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Published on 16/07/2020