Writer: Thami John | Artwork: Khanyisa Brancon
In the stark, white cube of Cape Town’s Everard Read Gallery, Khanyisa Agnes Brancon is conducting a ritual of return. Her solo exhibition, Garingani Wa Garingani, which marks her as the 2025 winner of the Blessing Ngobeni Art Prize, creates a profound site of cultural transmission. The title itself serves as conceptual key; a sacred Tsonga invocation used to open narratives, summoning ancestral voices from the fertile heartland of Tzaneen.
This geographic origin is fundamental. Tzaneen, Limpopo’s second-largest town, lies in a high-rainfall region, a 20,000-square-kilometre expanse of tropical agriculture. From this lush, red-earth terrain and its prominent Tsonga-speaking communities, Brancon draws her visual and spiritual language. The exhibition builds a dialogue between this life-giving soil and the gallery’s abstract space.
Brancon frames her practice as an offering to the maternal lineage flowing through her like a river, shaped by her Tsonga heritage.
“Through this work, I offer my own voice to the chorus of ancestral storytelling, adding my chapter to the ongoing epic of human migration, cultural adaptation, and the eternal search for home,” she says.
This hydrological metaphor materialises across three primary mediums. Her photographic works capture fleeting gestures and intimate glances, suspended between visibility and absence. These are not generic portraits but echoes of place, bearing Tzaneen’s spectral warmth. One almost hears the rhythmic music accompanying the Xibelani dance, a vibration emanating from the images.
The dance’s spirit permeates the space. The Xibelani is not merely a skirt but a cultural instrument, its design amplifying hip movement to narrate femininity, strength and community. This concept of embodied storytelling finds parallel in Brancon’s layered printmaking, where each piece becomes a visual palimpsest. Scratches and residues form the core content—inscriptions of a Tsonga past pressing on the present.
Sculptural installations anchor the exhibition, transforming the gallery into an architectural core of embodied experience. Some forms evoke the kinetic energy of dances like the Mchongolo, with its rhythmic, earth-connected movements. These works create spaces where ancestral tradition and physical displacement converge, inviting viewers to navigate between cultural memory and contemporary reality.
The through line is a rigorous meditation on the maternal line, a Tsonga cultural pillar. Brancon traces these paths with clear-eyed recognition of the women who shaped her, exploring how stories of migration from Tzaneen ripple across time as active forces. Each artwork acts as a tributary feeding the river of her lineage.
Within this framework, the journey from Tzaneen’s red earth to urban concrete arteries becomes universal reflection on belonging. The exhibition proposes identity as constantly evolving narrative—inherited, amended and passed onward.
Ultimately, Garingani Wa Garingani testifies to art’s power as technology for cultural safekeeping. Brancon’s practice reveals a past that is neither distant nor static, but alive in the Xibelani’s swing, resonant in Mchongolo’s steps, and unfolding through every image and constructed form. This exhibition invites us to witness how a culturally-grounded voice can honour the unseen and create vital space for transformation.
