The Beginning of Forever

Nandipha Mntambo, Conversation: The Beginning of Forever (diptych), 2015
Cowhide, resin, polyester mesh
Left: 223 x 183 x 27 cm, right: 215 x 193 x 25 cm
Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg , and Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm

Mntambo’s work has always given expression to
an interest in the embodied aspect of experience
and the ways in which collective imagery may be
housed within individual physicalities. Her cowhideand-
resin sculptures carry the traces of the artist’s
process of moulding, cutting and shaping of hide.
Each skin reveals the physical rituals undertaken to
bring these forms to life. The cowhide acts as a rigid
container, protecting a lacuna—a hollow space that
is not, however, empty. In this work, the two parts of
the sculpture face each other in an imagined lifeafter-
death dialogue.

Nandipha Mntambo was born in Swaziland in 1982. She graduated
with an MFA (cum laude) from the Michaelis School of Fine Art,
University of Cape Town, in 2007. Mntambo’s work, in several
media, often explores oppositions as a way of demonstrating that
meaning is made from a variety of perspectives. She is invested
in the forms that the body takes and the spaces it occupies in
relation to history and place.
She won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art
in 2011, for which she produced the national travelling exhibition,
Faena. She was a 2014 AIMIA/AGO Photography Prize finalist and
was part of the prize group exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario,
Canada. Mntambo has had five solo shows at Stevenson Cape,
Town and Johannesburg, and a solo exhibition of her art launched
the Zeitz MOCAA Pavilion, Cape Town (2014). Her first European
solo exhibition took place at Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm
(2013), where she had a second solo in 2015. Her work is included
in The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by
Contemporary African Artists, a touring exhibition that is currently
on show at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian
Institution, Washington, DC. She has participated in the Borås
International Sculpture Biennale, Sweden (2014); My Joburg at
La Maison Rouge, Paris; the Moscow International Biennale for
Young Art (2012); ARS 11, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art
and Tennis Palace Art Museum, Helsinki (2010, 2011); the Biennale
of Sydney (2010); the Dakar Biennale (2010); Peekaboo: Current
South Africa, Tennis Palace Art Museum, Helsinki (2010); Life Less
Ordinary: Performance and Display in South African Art, Djanogly
Gallery, Nottingham (2009); Les Rencontres de Bamako Biennale
of African photography, Bamako (2009); Beauty and Pleasure
in South African Contemporary Art, Stenersen Museum, Oslo
(2009); ZA: Young Art from South Africa, Palazzo delle Papesse,
Siena (2008); and Apartheid: The South African Mirror, Centre de
Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (2008). Mntambo was a
Civitella Ranieri Fellow in 2013.