Sam Ngcobo
RESIDENT
Sam Ncgobo is a multidisciplinary artist based in Johannesburg. She works mostly in the mediums of performance, drawings and installation.
Ncgobo has exhibited as part of the group exhibition ‘The New Black: A Rainbow Deferred’ at the Bashu Uhuru Freedom Festival (2024) and the ‘76/24 Print Exhibition’ with The Arts Company Soweto at Constitution Hill. (2024)
ARTIST STATEMENT
Sam Ngcobo engages with the subject matters of the Black female body and how she can re-represent it outside the constraints of coloniality, tradition, culture, religion and patriarchy by challenging ways of seeing experiences connected to Black womanhood.
She works with themes of femininity, sexuality, childhood wounds, mother issues, queerness and womanhood. In her work, she uses cow dung and ibomvu (red clay) as materials that make her reminiscent of rural KwaZulu-Natal to help her labour through her journey to healing her mother wound. She thinks of the labour required to make her art as something that becomes a kind of unseen bodily performance that connects her to the matriarchal labour that women in rural KwaZulu-natal traditionally take on. This ‘behind the scenes’ performance that intentionally remains uncaptured through her practice gives life to a performativity that connects her to her mother, her sister, her grandmother and rural KwaZulu-Natal. She works mostly in the mediums of performance, drawings and installation.
