In response to the growing sentiment of afrophobia and intolerance aimed at refugee and migrant communities in South Africa, blank presents Molelwane, an exhibition of works by Ayan Farah, Barthélémy Toguo, Daniel Arnan Quarshie, Ibrahim Mahama, Kaloki Nyamai, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Kresiah Mukwazhi, and Sabelo Mlangeni. In Setswana, the word ‘molelwane’ translates to a border, a boundary, or a margin. Bringing together artists from across the African continent whose practices engage, in different ways, with movement, belonging, and the instabilities of national identity in a globalized world, the exhibition conceives of a border not as a fixed geographical demarcation, but as a living, shifting threshold shaped and tested by memory, politics, and the fragile ethics of community.
Rather than approaching migration as a singular experience, the exhibition considers how identities, histories and forms of belonging are carried across geographies and generations, and how they are reshaped through movement, labour and exchange. Materiality is central to this thinking: how objects and materials themselves circulate, accumulating histories and bearing traces of the people, economies, and environments through which they have passed. Across modes of drawing, photography, textile, and sculpture, the works on Molelwane articulate belonging as something continually negotiated rather than given, determined as much by inheritance and memory as by movement and encounter. Crucially, this movement cannot be decoupled from the artificial cartographies of the post-colonial state whose political borders are neither natural nor historic lines, but violent technologies designed to partition labour pools, criminalise African mobility, and enforce spatial control.
It is a bitter irony that, within living memory, the lines on the map separating South Africa from its northern neighbours were in reality rendered abstract and mutable by the border communities who opened their arms and homes, voluntarily assisting in the escape of political exiles resisting the oppressive apartheid regime and providing sanctuary from its structural and physical violences. Crossing melelwane (borders) was an act of shared survival, rooted in an unwritten code of Pan-African solidarity and collective humanity.
Set against the context of this recent history, Molelwane also acts as a conceptual mirror: it asks how a boundary transforms from a refuge into an instrument of exclusion; how hard-won freedom becomes enclosed behind (inherited) nation lines, transforming former allies into ‘foreigners’ and turning the rescued promise of Pan-African mobility into an incitement of violence, vigilantism, and precarious survival. Through the bringing together of these artists’ works, the exhibition reflects on the ways in which post-apartheid xenophobia or afrophobia reproduces the same cynical logic of borders first introduced to extract and control colonial capital, enforce migrant labour systems, and police the movement of people and their exchange of knowledge, resources, and cultural memory.
Daniel Arnan Quarshie’s (b.1995, Kumasi, Ghana) series of charcoal drawings on canvas urgently engage themes of neocolonial extraction and late stage capitalism through their imagery of textile waste landfills in Ghana. Drawn from photographs which the artist digitally manipulates and collages together, the works in this series gesture at the life cycle of the fast fashion industry: garments are mass-produced in the global south, worn in the global north, then ‘returned’ to developing nations as second-hand goods or waste. These mountainous textile dumps speak to how objects and materials circulate through the global economy, traversing borders through the course of their lives, and accumulating loaded residues from all the environments they’ve passed through.
In her abstract textile works, Kresiah Mukwazhi (b. 1992, Harare, Zimbabwe) uses hundreds of secondhand bras that are smuggled into the country, carefully deconstructing each piece of underwear, then stitching together and stretching the straps over frames. Packaged in bales and shipped to Africa as donations from wealthier countries, the bras are filtered through the informal trade economies until they are eventually sold in bulk at local markets. The resulting compositions recall the many women whose bodies have worn them; they are permeated with the traces of their previous owners, both in the physical and the ‘energetic’ sense. For Mukwazhi, the works gesture too at the countless women who have lost their lives due to gender-based violence.
Ibrahim Mahama (b. 1987, Tamale, Ghana) continues his critical exploration of globalisation, mobility, and the hyper-circulation of commodities under global capitalism. In a new series of works, Mahama brings together two primary materials: traditional hand-woven batakari textiles and tyre ply, creating a dialogue between different histories of artisanal production, industry, and the transformation of materials. Historically associated with regional textile practices, the cultivation and manufacturing of traditional handwoven batakari was significantly affected during the colonial period, and were never regained despite efforts following Ghana’s independence. By combining the batakari with tyre ply, a material connected to cycles of use, labour, and circulation, the artist creates a dialogue between different material histories, bringing together traditional forms of textile production and industrial remnants. The incorporation of metal tags introduces another layer connected to systems of classification, value, and exchange: traditionally used to identify and assess commodities before circulation, these tags retain the memory of economic processes and infrastructures of trade. Through processes of assembling and transforming these materials, the works preserve traces of labour, time, and social histories.
Directly engaging the subject of migration and the bureaucracy of border management, the enlarged ink and wood sculptures by Barthélémy Toguo (b. 1967, M’Balmayo, Cameroon) exaggerate and satirise the official stamps used to mark passports, which he also used to make prints on paper, a series of which will be included in the exhibition. First presented at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, in 2001, the literal weight of the sculptures exemplifies the heavy burden for immigrants of being in a constant state of transition. The work highlights the difficulty of travelling for people forced into exile as well as those who long for change and the experience of something beyond their own borders.
Through layered surfaces composed of paint, transferred newsprint, collage, thread, rope, and yarn, Kaloki Nyamai’s (b. 1985, Kitui, Kenya) large-scale painting moves between figuration and abstraction, constructing visual spaces in which personal narratives intersect with historical realities. The physicality of these materials carries both emotional and symbolic weight, allowing each canvas to function simultaneously as image, object, and archive, while the composition reflects moments of ease, intimacy, and bliss: bodies in nature, gestures of tenderness and seduction, and scenes of shared presence. The work marks a further movement toward abstraction, where bodies dissolve into fields of colour and densely textured surfaces. These images become metaphors for togetherness, abundance, and collective respite within an increasingly chaotic world. The recto-verso construction of the painting contains an additional, hidden reverse, concealing and revealing drawn figures, stitched forms, and layered surfaces: another narrative, another memory.
The work of Ayan Farah (b. 1978, Sharjah, UAE) reflects upon themes of identity, visibility and oppression in a global world, often drawing upon her Somali-Swedish heritage and itinerant outlook. Within each painting disparate world-views merge, oppose each other, or co-exist, rejecting linear narratives. She uses found, often historic materials, which already carry their own (life) story: fragments of embroidered ornaments or lettering emphasise a personalised quality to the material. Farah collects minerals, plants and soils, which are charged with a specific character of the place from which they were taken, so that each work becomes a material index to the landscape in which they are formed. Referring to African handcraft traditions, the artist uses alchemy to combine elements and natural substances like Indigo, Dead Sea mud, terracotta, and India ink to produce dyes and chemical reactions with which she colours her textiles. Although not explicitly political, issues of power, property, trade, territory and colonial relations permeate her practice.
In a series of six portraits taken in the derelict area behind the Hotel Globo in central Luanda, Kilanji Hia Henda (b. 1979, Luanda, Angola) brings into the foreground found, trivial objects that conceal and divert attention away from the man behind them. The found object not only obstructs the gaze, of both the portrayed and the observer, but also reveals an extremely violent process, the thingification of the black man, who is repeatedly made an object: the object of his own work (as labour disconnected from that which he produces), the object of colonialism (which treats him as merchandise), the object of the object (as a being made a subject by the found object), and finally the object of the photograph (which turns him into the object consumed by the gaze).
Specially selected for Molelwane, Sabelo Mlangeni (b. 1980, Driefontein, South Africa) brings together a new group of photographs taken in 2008, 2015, and 2026, spanning the administrations of three South African presidents (Mbeki, Zuma, and Ramaphosa) and over half of the period since the first democratic elections were held in 1994. The images document eruptions of xenophobic unrest and instances of civil protests and deadly riots in Johannesburg and Durban, where, just last week, an immigrant on his way to work was attacked and beaten to death by a mob. The most recent body of photographs is largely concentrated around the mass demonstrations in Durban, organised by the political faction known as ‘March and March’. In it, scenes of excited protesters, some dressed in costume or wielding sjamboks (whips) and traditional Zulu attire, are juxtaposed with the artist’s documentation of the city’s refugee reception centre on Che Guevara Road, which has been under siege since the anti-immigration movement exploded in June of this year. In those images, which contrast starkly with the jubilant scenes of the marching crowds, communal tents and makeshift shelters spread haphazardly between buses and police casspirs (armoured vehicle), as crowds of migrants and refugees wait and queue amidst discarded baggage and rubbish for their opportunity to be deported.
By bringing these diverse practices into conversation, the exhibition frames migration and its xenophobic shadow not as an isolated crisis or a state of exception, but as an ongoing condition shaped by historical debts, global trade, industrial capitalism, and post-colonial border regimes. Molelwane invites us to refuse the logics of borders that seek to enclose and exclude. In their place, it insists on belonging as an active, collective practice.
Rather than approaching migration as a singular experience, the exhibition considers how identities, histories and forms of belonging are carried across geographies and generations, and how they are reshaped through movement, labour and exchange. Materiality is central to this thinking: how objects and materials themselves circulate, accumulating histories and bearing traces of the people, economies, and environments through which they have passed. Across modes of drawing, photography, textile, and sculpture, the works on Molelwane articulate belonging as something continually negotiated rather than given, determined as much by inheritance and memory as by movement and encounter. Crucially, this movement cannot be decoupled from the artificial cartographies of the post-colonial state whose political borders are neither natural nor historic lines, but violent technologies designed to partition labour pools, criminalise African mobility, and enforce spatial control.
It is a bitter irony that, within living memory, the lines on the map separating South Africa from its northern neighbours were in reality rendered abstract and mutable by the border communities who opened their arms and homes, voluntarily assisting in the escape of political exiles resisting the oppressive apartheid regime and providing sanctuary from its structural and physical violences. Crossing melelwane (borders) was an act of shared survival, rooted in an unwritten code of Pan-African solidarity and collective humanity.
Set against the context of this recent history, Molelwane also acts as a conceptual mirror: it asks how a boundary transforms from a refuge into an instrument of exclusion; how hard-won freedom becomes enclosed behind (inherited) nation lines, transforming former allies into ‘foreigners’ and turning the rescued promise of Pan-African mobility into an incitement of violence, vigilantism, and precarious survival. Through the bringing together of these artists’ works, the exhibition reflects on the ways in which post-apartheid xenophobia or afrophobia reproduces the same cynical logic of borders first introduced to extract and control colonial capital, enforce migrant labour systems, and police the movement of people and their exchange of knowledge, resources, and cultural memory.
Daniel Arnan Quarshie’s (b.1995, Kumasi, Ghana) series of charcoal drawings on canvas urgently engage themes of neocolonial extraction and late stage capitalism through their imagery of textile waste landfills in Ghana. Drawn from photographs which the artist digitally manipulates and collages together, the works in this series gesture at the life cycle of the fast fashion industry: garments are mass-produced in the global south, worn in the global north, then ‘returned’ to developing nations as second-hand goods or waste. These mountainous textile dumps speak to how objects and materials circulate through the global economy, traversing borders through the course of their lives, and accumulating loaded residues from all the environments they’ve passed through.
In her abstract textile works, Kresiah Mukwazhi (b. 1992, Harare, Zimbabwe) uses hundreds of secondhand bras that are smuggled into the country, carefully deconstructing each piece of underwear, then stitching together and stretching the straps over frames. Packaged in bales and shipped to Africa as donations from wealthier countries, the bras are filtered through the informal trade economies until they are eventually sold in bulk at local markets. The resulting compositions recall the many women whose bodies have worn them; they are permeated with the traces of their previous owners, both in the physical and the ‘energetic’ sense. For Mukwazhi, the works gesture too at the countless women who have lost their lives due to gender-based violence.
Ibrahim Mahama (b. 1987, Tamale, Ghana) continues his critical exploration of globalisation, mobility, and the hyper-circulation of commodities under global capitalism. In a new series of works, Mahama brings together two primary materials: traditional hand-woven batakari textiles and tyre ply, creating a dialogue between different histories of artisanal production, industry, and the transformation of materials. Historically associated with regional textile practices, the cultivation and manufacturing of traditional handwoven batakari was significantly affected during the colonial period, and were never regained despite efforts following Ghana’s independence. By combining the batakari with tyre ply, a material connected to cycles of use, labour, and circulation, the artist creates a dialogue between different material histories, bringing together traditional forms of textile production and industrial remnants. The incorporation of metal tags introduces another layer connected to systems of classification, value, and exchange: traditionally used to identify and assess commodities before circulation, these tags retain the memory of economic processes and infrastructures of trade. Through processes of assembling and transforming these materials, the works preserve traces of labour, time, and social histories.
Directly engaging the subject of migration and the bureaucracy of border management, the enlarged ink and wood sculptures by Barthélémy Toguo (b. 1967, M’Balmayo, Cameroon) exaggerate and satirise the official stamps used to mark passports, which he also used to make prints on paper, a series of which will be included in the exhibition. First presented at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, in 2001, the literal weight of the sculptures exemplifies the heavy burden for immigrants of being in a constant state of transition. The work highlights the difficulty of travelling for people forced into exile as well as those who long for change and the experience of something beyond their own borders.
Through layered surfaces composed of paint, transferred newsprint, collage, thread, rope, and yarn, Kaloki Nyamai’s (b. 1985, Kitui, Kenya) large-scale painting moves between figuration and abstraction, constructing visual spaces in which personal narratives intersect with historical realities. The physicality of these materials carries both emotional and symbolic weight, allowing each canvas to function simultaneously as image, object, and archive, while the composition reflects moments of ease, intimacy, and bliss: bodies in nature, gestures of tenderness and seduction, and scenes of shared presence. The work marks a further movement toward abstraction, where bodies dissolve into fields of colour and densely textured surfaces. These images become metaphors for togetherness, abundance, and collective respite within an increasingly chaotic world. The recto-verso construction of the painting contains an additional, hidden reverse, concealing and revealing drawn figures, stitched forms, and layered surfaces: another narrative, another memory.
The work of Ayan Farah (b. 1978, Sharjah, UAE) reflects upon themes of identity, visibility and oppression in a global world, often drawing upon her Somali-Swedish heritage and itinerant outlook. Within each painting disparate world-views merge, oppose each other, or co-exist, rejecting linear narratives. She uses found, often historic materials, which already carry their own (life) story: fragments of embroidered ornaments or lettering emphasise a personalised quality to the material. Farah collects minerals, plants and soils, which are charged with a specific character of the place from which they were taken, so that each work becomes a material index to the landscape in which they are formed. Referring to African handcraft traditions, the artist uses alchemy to combine elements and natural substances like Indigo, Dead Sea mud, terracotta, and India ink to produce dyes and chemical reactions with which she colours her textiles. Although not explicitly political, issues of power, property, trade, territory and colonial relations permeate her practice.
In a series of six portraits taken in the derelict area behind the Hotel Globo in central Luanda, Kilanji Hia Henda (b. 1979, Luanda, Angola) brings into the foreground found, trivial objects that conceal and divert attention away from the man behind them. The found object not only obstructs the gaze, of both the portrayed and the observer, but also reveals an extremely violent process, the thingification of the black man, who is repeatedly made an object: the object of his own work (as labour disconnected from that which he produces), the object of colonialism (which treats him as merchandise), the object of the object (as a being made a subject by the found object), and finally the object of the photograph (which turns him into the object consumed by the gaze).
Specially selected for Molelwane, Sabelo Mlangeni (b. 1980, Driefontein, South Africa) brings together a new group of photographs taken in 2008, 2015, and 2026, spanning the administrations of three South African presidents (Mbeki, Zuma, and Ramaphosa) and over half of the period since the first democratic elections were held in 1994. The images document eruptions of xenophobic unrest and instances of civil protests and deadly riots in Johannesburg and Durban, where, just last week, an immigrant on his way to work was attacked and beaten to death by a mob. The most recent body of photographs is largely concentrated around the mass demonstrations in Durban, organised by the political faction known as ‘March and March’. In it, scenes of excited protesters, some dressed in costume or wielding sjamboks (whips) and traditional Zulu attire, are juxtaposed with the artist’s documentation of the city’s refugee reception centre on Che Guevara Road, which has been under siege since the anti-immigration movement exploded in June of this year. In those images, which contrast starkly with the jubilant scenes of the marching crowds, communal tents and makeshift shelters spread haphazardly between buses and police casspirs (armoured vehicle), as crowds of migrants and refugees wait and queue amidst discarded baggage and rubbish for their opportunity to be deported.
By bringing these diverse practices into conversation, the exhibition frames migration and its xenophobic shadow not as an isolated crisis or a state of exception, but as an ongoing condition shaped by historical debts, global trade, industrial capitalism, and post-colonial border regimes. Molelwane invites us to refuse the logics of borders that seek to enclose and exclude. In their place, it insists on belonging as an active, collective practice.
