Writer: Kukhanya Mthimkulu | Artwork: Invisible Thread Exhibition
There is a thread—unseen, but felt. A vibration. A pulse.
It pulled me toward Invisible Thread, the curatorial offering within this year’s Independent Artist Exhibition at the RMB Latitudes Art Fair. Curated by Bonolo Kavula, the exhibition gathers eight independent artists whose works are described as “an investigation into process-based material explorations as a form of interconnected dialogue between participants.”
But this thread is not merely material—it is mnemonic. It is mourning. It is resistance.
There is something in the way these works speak, not through representation but through presence. Through process. Through the refusal to resolve.
The group exhibition includes works by Yonela Doda, Thato Makatu, Tshepo Phokojoe, Khanyi Mawhayi, Dineo Ponde, Unathi Mkonto, Tinyiko Makwakwa and Bonolo Kavula.
To consider these pieces is to think of memory not as nostalgia but as rupture. Memory, here, is not a passive act of looking back. It is a confrontation. A refusal. In the historical afterlife of slavery, colonialism and apartheid, the Black subject has never been meant to remember—only to be remembered by others. To archive, in this context, has often meant to preserve the lie: that we were marginal, that we were subordinate, that our being was never central to the construction of the world as we know it.
And yet, to remember is to resist disappearance. It is to remain present in a world structured around our absence. It is not healing. It is not closure. It is the insistence that the wound is still open.
Yonela Doda
There is something deeply radical about the ways these artists engage memory—not through figuration or narrative, but through texture, gesture, rhythm. Many of the works are abstract, using thread, cloth, print, mark-making as a kind of invocation. They do not illustrate memory—they materialise it. Memory becomes tactile. Rough. Irregular. Grief lives in the grain of the canvas, the tension of the weave, the repetition of the gesture.
These are not commemorations. They are conjuring’s. The artists are not offering answers, they are marking absences. Refusing to smooth over rupture with resolution.
Their presence at Latitudes is significant. Not just as artists exhibiting at a fair, but as a collective manifestation of being. A declaration that the space of the gallery—long a site of exclusion—is being reconfigured. Claimed. Breached. These works inhabit that space not as guests, but as ghosts refusing to be exorcised.
Dineo Mafora
There is no neat conclusion to what they offer. No gesture toward redemption. Instead, they ask us to linger. To look closer. To feel what was disavowed.
They weave, tear, and thread memory into the walls.
They remind us that to be remembered is not enough.
One must insist on being unforgettable.
* RMB Latitudes Art Fair is set to take place in the enchanting Shepstone Gardens from Friday, 23 May to Sunday, 25 May 2025.
