Writer: Tsakani Shingange | Artwork: Tshepo Bopape

Tshepo Bopape, the winner of the 2025 DALRO Visual Arts Merit Award, is set to present his solo exhibition titled Sea-Crits In The Water after a nine-month-long artist residency. In 2024, the Dramatic Artistic Literary Rights Organisation (DALRO) partnered with the Blessing Ngobeni Art Prize Foundation to launch the first-ever DALRO Visual Arts Merit Award, which was won by Tshepo Bopape.

Over the course of nine months, Bopape was incubated to create a comprehensive body of work for his first-ever solo exhibition in a live-in studio at the Ellis House Art Building. The artist chose to conceptualize his exhibition around the concept of water and its relationship to African spirituality. The exhibition highlights the artist’s personal spiritual journey with exciting anecdotes, mythology, and nostalgia.

Bopape’s artistic practice studies and interrogates how beliefs impact our daily lives. His canvases depict deep spiritual inner workings in a quest to find meaning and understanding. His artistic practice brings the personal into the public, allowing for communal creation and the sharing of insights. Sea-Crits Of The Water is a critical study of water, revealing the truths of its life-giving power. It dives into the unknown, exploring how the Spirit of the Most High may manifest as water, leading one to acknowledge their higher self. This body of work explores concepts of faith, conspiracy, mythology, and indigenous knowledge systems in a celebration of African metaphysics—the science of African people.

Foregrounding systematically marginalized ancient African knowledge systems, Sea-Crits Of The Water invites viewers into a state of prayer, asking, and meditation. The exhibition will be open for public viewing from the 3rd of April at the DALRO headquarters in Bramley.