Tolika Mtoliki is a group exhibition bringing together South African artists around the proposition that translation extends beyond language. Objects, too, can translate. They carry histories, memories and forms of knowledge from one context to another, from one generation to the next, and from one place to another.
Tolika is a term used across several Southern African languages meaning “to translate” or “to interpret”. The word derives from the Dutch tolk, meaning “interpreter”, while mtoliki refers to someone who translates or interprets. The title evokes histories of linguistic and cultural movement, as well as the transformations that accompany displacement. Translation does not mean reproducing an original meaning unchanged; it means transferring meaning into another context, where it inevitably shifts.
In Nicholas Hlobo’s work, ribbon, leather, wood, rubber detritus and found objects are stitched and assembled together into hybrid forms exploring identity, masculinity and his Xhosa heritage.
Bulumko Mbete draws on textile, beading and weaving traditions passed through her family and community, treating them as indigenous archives of migration and generational knowledge.
Kagiso Patrick Mautloa combines found objects from Johannesburg with constructed forms, bringing the physical traces of urban life into his sculptures.
Frans Thoka uses the prison blanket as both an object and a subject, addressing imprisonment, migration, displacement and land dispossession.
Mankebe Seakgoe's work moves between language and drawing. Her inscriptions resemble writing while resisting a fixed reading, allowing language to become something felt as much as understood.
Xhanti Zwelendaba and Benjamin Stanwix rework and recontextualise photographs of South African landscapes onto ikhukho, a traditional handwoven grass or reed mat, bringing histories of place into new contexts.
Tolika Mtoliki ultimately offers a dialogue between objects, languages, and memories, where each artwork becomes its own form of translating the world.
