blank is pleased to present Gqal’emgqubeni, a solo exhibition by Asemahle Ntlonti and her third with the gallery.
Loving one’s home is not about being fixed into a place, but rather it is about becoming part of a space where one has expanded one’s body, saturating the space with bodily matter: home as overflowing and flowing over.
In her introduction to Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed argues that orientation is “a question not only about how we ‘find our way’, but how we come to ‘feel at home’.” For Ahmed, a core aspect of being oriented is feeling the ability to inhabit a space, to be able to ‘expand’ into an area, as opposed to feeling a discomfort or alienation that inhibits one’s body from stretching into itself. Engaging ‘migrant orientation’ as a “lived experience facing at least two different directions: toward a home that has been lost, and to a place that is not yet home”, Ahmed’s phenomenology echoes with colonised, diasporic, marginalised and queered identities everywhere.
Over the past few years, Asemahle Ntlonti’s laboured surfaces — painted, torn, sewn — have attempted the revival of her lost familial home in Mqonci, Ngcobo, in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. Echoing the gentle palettes and aged textures of her village’s rondavel walls, the pastel shades peel and fade on canvases plied with plastic stitches made from the threads of fruit and vegbearing polypropylene bags, or ingxowa. These stitches, collectively creating swollen softened textures, rupture the canvas surfaces while simultaneously performing a kind of repair. In Gqal’emgqubeni, the presence of Ntlonti’s stitch is further emphasised, with swathes of dark green stitching stark against light backgrounds in irregular clumps, mapping imagined land formations in soft quiltlike textures.
The desire to expand, to stretch into oneself, and to become oriented, even while potentially facing “two different directions”, gives intensity and gentle force to Ntlonti’s practice. Over the last decade, she has engaged myriad strategies to create re-oriented studies that hone in on details of collective Southern African historical realities as well as more personal and ancestral questions regarding displacement and alienation. The artist’s early interventions with scale and repetition, and later examinations of texture and colour, show an interest in the labouring of reference points — usually her own memory cues — until they are made strange, and sometimes altogether lost. The resulting forms, as re-readings or unlearnings of place and object, enact a desire for a different kind of mapping of the world, in which more expansive (in)habitation is possible.
[Excerpt from Orientation and “Homeplace” in the work of Asemahle Ntlonti by Thulile Gamedze (2025)]
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Loving one’s home is not about being fixed into a place, but rather it is about becoming part of a space where one has expanded one’s body, saturating the space with bodily matter: home as overflowing and flowing over.
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology
In her introduction to Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed argues that orientation is “a question not only about how we ‘find our way’, but how we come to ‘feel at home’.” For Ahmed, a core aspect of being oriented is feeling the ability to inhabit a space, to be able to ‘expand’ into an area, as opposed to feeling a discomfort or alienation that inhibits one’s body from stretching into itself. Engaging ‘migrant orientation’ as a “lived experience facing at least two different directions: toward a home that has been lost, and to a place that is not yet home”, Ahmed’s phenomenology echoes with colonised, diasporic, marginalised and queered identities everywhere.
Over the past few years, Asemahle Ntlonti’s laboured surfaces — painted, torn, sewn — have attempted the revival of her lost familial home in Mqonci, Ngcobo, in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. Echoing the gentle palettes and aged textures of her village’s rondavel walls, the pastel shades peel and fade on canvases plied with plastic stitches made from the threads of fruit and vegbearing polypropylene bags, or ingxowa. These stitches, collectively creating swollen softened textures, rupture the canvas surfaces while simultaneously performing a kind of repair. In Gqal’emgqubeni, the presence of Ntlonti’s stitch is further emphasised, with swathes of dark green stitching stark against light backgrounds in irregular clumps, mapping imagined land formations in soft quiltlike textures.
The desire to expand, to stretch into oneself, and to become oriented, even while potentially facing “two different directions”, gives intensity and gentle force to Ntlonti’s practice. Over the last decade, she has engaged myriad strategies to create re-oriented studies that hone in on details of collective Southern African historical realities as well as more personal and ancestral questions regarding displacement and alienation. The artist’s early interventions with scale and repetition, and later examinations of texture and colour, show an interest in the labouring of reference points — usually her own memory cues — until they are made strange, and sometimes altogether lost. The resulting forms, as re-readings or unlearnings of place and object, enact a desire for a different kind of mapping of the world, in which more expansive (in)habitation is possible.
[Excerpt from Orientation and “Homeplace” in the work of Asemahle Ntlonti by Thulile Gamedze (2025)]
