The Melrose Gallery is pleased to present Hlukanisa, uHlanganise, a group exhibition curated by Mpumi Mayisa, opening on 13 April 2025. The exhibition brings together works by Dr. Esther Mahlangu, Charity Vilakazi, Tinyiko Makwakwa, Nikiwe Dlova, Puleng Mongale, and Nwabisa Ntlokwana. Artists whose practices unravel, reconstruct, and extend matrilineal transmissions through material and conceptual interventions.The show includes paintings, sculpture, textiles, photography, and digital media.
Hlukanisa uHlanganise
In Hlukanisa, uHlanganise which translates to take apart (deconstruct) in order to reconstruct/create anew we step into a field of knowledge transmission where language, lineage, and materiality intersect. This exhibition convenes an intergenerational dialogue between the iconic Dr. Esther Mahlangu and contemporary artists Charity Vilakazi, Tinyiko Makwakwa, Nikiwe Dlova, Puleng Mongale, and Nwabisa Ntlokwana. The show includes paintings, sculpture, textiles, photography, and digital media. Their works navigate the terrains of African epistemologies, where science, memory, and the body exist as sites of inscription, transference, and renewal.
By interrogating materiality as a site of knowledge-making, Hlukanisa, uHlanganise asks: what if learning did not need to be didactic to be legitimate? If African histories have always been written - onto walls, woven into braids, shaped into clay, inscribed in ochre - how do we recover and honor these ways of knowing? The exhibition does not seek to simply preserve these traditions but rather to extend them, to take apart in order to reconstruct anew. Through acts of remembering, reshaping, and reimagining, these artists participate in a broader lineage of Black feminist thought, where the matrilineal archive is neither fixed nor lost, it is always in flux, being remade in the present.