Ukubekezela: Mapping a fractured terrain

Mail & Guardian

24-06-2025

Woven with meaning: Works from Senzeni Marasela's show Waiting and Remembering, recently on at the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture Gallery at the University of Johannesburg.
Earlier this month, the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (FADA) Gallery at the University of Johannesburg inaugurated a dual exhibition that featured Senzeni Marasela's Waiting and Remembering, from 7 to 22 June.
The exhibition expanded Marasela's commitment to art as public memory work. As a VIAD Research Associate and Thami Mnyele Foundation fellow, Marasela's practice resonates far beyond local geographies — a transnational dialogue that bridges past, present and speculative futures.
Senzeni Marasela, born in 1977 in Thokoza, Gauteng, is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans performance, photography, textiles, video and installation. A graduate of the Wits School of Arts (1998), she explores themes of black South African womanhood, memory and displacement through archival materials and material culture.
Marasela has exhibited widely, both locally and internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston) and the Johannesburg Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale.
On 11 June, the artist, accompanied by her curator, the artist and researcher Refilwe Nkomo, led a walkabout at FADA. Throughout the tour, Marasela responded to audience questions with the same deliberate subtlety that animates her practice.
Nkomo began by introducing the audience to how the exhibition is anchored in Maru Musi, a framework of black feminist scholarship. This anti-museum project, developed by Nkomo, resists the traditional archive and reimagines the exhibition as a space for belonging, justice, homing and refusal.
At the centre of Waiting and Remembering stands Theodorah, Marasela's enduring alter ego. Since 2002, Theodorah has appeared as a woman searching for her missing husband, Gebane — a potent metaphor for loss, historical rupture and unresolved grief.
Through photographic series beginning in 2004, and notably adopting the red dress, or iphinifa elibomvu, in 2013 as a performative garment, Theodorah traces journeys across Joburg's haunted terrain — a city deeply marked by apartheid spatial violence and gendered displacement.
As Marasela walked us through the show, which featured a majority of textile works, we began to see the centrality of questions of gender. The textile maps become mnemonic devices, their rings and strings symbolising cycles of loss, erasure and return. Marasela says X marks the last known location of Gebane.
In other works, concentric rings depict mine dumps. Living in Soweto, Marasela is intimately attuned to the lingering spectres of mining — the decommissioned shafts, the unaccounted for men and the environmental and psychological scars left behind.
The artist guided us through the space with an ease that can only come from familiarity. Though no longer donning the red dress, she still carries Theodorah's journey with her.
Describing her method as an 'intimate cartographic intervention', Marasela maps not streets but absences — tracing a palimpsest of hybrid histories through family memory, colonial residue and professional presence. Theodorah emerges then, not as a figure of nostalgia or ethnographic display, but as a vessel of black feminine memory.
Marasela transforms fantasies of escape into embodied arrival, rooted in a history of women's exclusion from formal work until 1952. Her red dress became a symbol of visibility and vulnerability, often provoking alienation, such as at New York's JFK Airport, where she faced profiling based on this 'look of poverty'. Embodying Theodorah, she was seen as an object of pity rather than a successful artist.
Marasela uses this opacity to protect meaning, examining how visibility is negotiated in institutional spaces and how geography and racialised optics govern recognition.
This is palpable in Marasela's use of textiles — not just the red dress but the checkered blanket or itshali. Far more than garments or shrouds, these materials become witnesses: to those who wore them, waited in them or disappeared from them.
'These aren't costumes,' she explained during the walkabout. 'They're lived things — propositions, documents, mourning cloths.'
Marasela's itshali — handwoven with red wool — traces psychic and geographic connections to Johannesburg's fractured terrain. Although now seen as cultural symbols, the itshali is in fact a colonial import from Scotland, layered with both imposed and reclaimed meaning.
But it is this title that most profoundly distills the philosophical essence of Marasela's enduring practice. Waiting and Remembering summons situated epistemologies — evoking terms such as ukubekezela and ukukhumbula. These are not passive states; they are ritualised technologies of endurance — inflected by gender, shaped by vernacular cosmologies and laden with the psychic weight of historical repetition.
In isiZulu, ukubekezela connotes more than patience; it gestures toward a spiritual poise in the face of sustained difficulty, a kind of embodied suspension that is often feminised and too often romanticised as silent suffering.
Likewise, ukukhumbula is not mere recollection, but a summoning of the dead, the disappeared, the otherwise — a practice of memory that is as much spatial as it is ancestral.
In Marasela's practice, waiting and remembering are not merely themes but methodologies of refusal and opacity that destabilise easy recognition.
They function as recursive, relational strategies that make meaning both visible and withheld, demanding attunement rather than mastery.
Through Theodorah's journey, Waiting and Remembering maps Joburg as a fractured psychic terrain where violence and survival are entangled. Rather than offering an archive, the work leaves an afterimage — a lingering trace of history carried in the body.