Senzeni Marasela
Senzeni Marasela lives and works in Soweto, South Africa. A cross disciplinary artist who explores performance, photography, video, prints, and mixed-medium installations involving textiles and embroidery, her work deals with history, memory, and personal narrative, emphasising historical gaps and overlooked figures.
In 2023 Marasela became the recipient of the inaugural K21 Global Art Prize in Dusseldorf, awarded to artists with courage and vision, at the beginning or middle of their careers, by the Kunstammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen museum. Her work is in prominent international collections, including the Newark Museum, Smithsonian Institution and MoMA, New York, the Kunstammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen museum as well as private collections such as the Leridon collection in Paris, the Harry David collection in Athens and the Sindika Dokolo collection in Angola. Marasela is interested in the multiplicity contained within the experience of waiting and in the pathologies of women who are made to wait or who, perhaps, choose to do so. Her work is monumental in number, scale and duration, echoing the countless untold and unheard stories of black women in her home country and, by extension, across Africa.
In 2003, Marasela began to tell the story of a woman called Theodorah, whose husband, Gebane, has left their rural home to find work in Johannesburg. The narrative began with a durational performance based on her own mother's stories about the eleven-hour journey from the rural area of Mvenyane to the city. Marasela wore a yellow dress that her mother gave her, taking the name and person of Theodorah as her alter-ego. Over the following two decades Marasela has continued to depict Theodorah waiting and searching for her husband.
