Sugar Boats and Online Playgrounds | Discover these 5 Young Artists

Discover the works of Zenaéca Singh, Natalie Paneng, Anico Mostert, Rachel Marsil and Rita Sala-Treig as they grapple with identity, memory and history through their artistic practice.

 

 

Zenaéca Singh’s work explores the complex history of the sugar economy in South Africa and its entanglement with exploitative labour practices, migration, colonialism, and the dynamics of the domestic sphere. Working across painting, sculpture and installation, Singh interrogates the largely state-produced archive of images and text related to indentured South African Indians in the period 1860 – 1911.

 

 

Her current work translates this archival material into image sequences and alluring sculptures made from molasses and sugar in different states of solidity and fluidity.

 

 

Her sculptures of melting sugar ships recall the fluid connection between India and South Africa across the Indian Ocean, a relationship fortified by Britain’s colonisation of both countries in the late 19th Century. Fixed in resin, frozen in a state of perpetual transition and collapse, these ships evoke the temporal suspension of the archive: it is both fluid and static, borne of the past and unresolved in the present and future.

 

Click here to read more about the artist.

 

 

 

Natalie Paneng (b.1996) is a Johannesburg based multidisciplinary artist. Paneng received her BA in Dramatic Arts from the University of Witwatersrand in 2018 and was awarded the Leon Gluckman Prize for the best piece of creative work. Paneng draws on her theatre background and self taught digital skills to create multidisciplinary digital art/new media. Paneng describes herself as a world-builder and sees her growing practice as a way to navigate, share and archive imagined and alternative realities brought to life through digital artistic process.

 

 

Paneng has exhibited with TMRW Gallery, The National Arts Festival , Blank Projects Michaelis School of Fine Art, BKHz, Javett UP and Galerie Eigen Art Leipzig and Mutek. Along with this, she has participated in local artist residencies such as Bubblegum Future 76 Residency (2018), Floating Reverie (2019) and Fak’ugesi Digital Innovation Artist Residency (2019) and The Centre of A Less Good Idea’s So Academy’s ‘Thinking in Cardboard’ scenographers mentorship (2021). She has also published creative research through Ellipses Journal and Artist Research Africa as well as being a 202 Fellow with the Institute of Creative Arts and UCT. Her first solo exhibition ‘Maze’ was presented internationally in Leipzig, Germany, at Galerie EIGEN + ART.

 

Click here to read more about the artist.

 

 

 

Anico Mostert is a multi-disciplinary artist and printmaker from Cape Town. She graduated from Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 2017, where she majored in printmaking. Anico’s work speaks to the quiet moments of the everyday. Her approach to making is versatile, seeing her producing across ceramics, textile design, animation and painting. She allows her practice to be intuitive and exist as a process of learning and discovery, creating the space for vivid colours and coltish figures to find their place in paintings and prints.

 

Anico uses reference images from social media to imagine still-lifes of ordinary scenes, observing the elements of the medium for the artwork to determine itself. Each piece’s name occurs as Anico imagines what it would say if it could speak. The works upend familiarity, reminiscent of home spaces, yet offering a surreal swing of imagery, where rooms are unpeopled and yet full of life and pictures of people are empty of objects.

 

 

Her works exude a calm quietness, illustrating unexpected details and unassuming scenarios that verge on the mundane but are illuminated through her attention and careful colour

choices. Anico’s work depicts still lifes, interactions and scenes that feel familiar and comforting but are also somewhat inverted and distorted to feel fresh and unexpected.

 

Click here to read more about the artist.

 

 

 

Rita Sala (Barcelona, 1994) graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona, she holds a Degree in Humanities from the UOC and a Master’s Degree in Curatorship: exhibitions, design and spaces from EINA. She combines her artistic practice with other participation in projects. Thus, since 2021 she has been part of the group that manages, coordinates and curates La Butxaca Màgica exhibition space. In recent years she has been researching the human need to signify the space one occupies and surrounds with, trying to find a meaning. From here, her painting are configured as a space that at the same time as being contained, contains figures that function as a background and a background that is, at the same time, figure. Her pictorial practice is a constant investigation into the narratives of images and languages.

 

 

Usually, she builds her works around pictorial narratives that alternate and overlap, circulate and relate through different locations, levels and points of view. Some comings and goings, between abstract and everyday issues, that point to the same thing: human beings and their activity, thoughts and affections, memories and life stories.

 

Click here to read more about the artist.

 

 

 

Rachel Marsil was born in Lille, France in 1995. She is originally

from the Senegal and currently lives in Paris. She graduated from the Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs de Paris and developed an artistic language at the crossroads of textile design and painting. Her multidisciplinary work deals with

questions of identity and the representations that can be linked to it. Through her research, Rachel Marsil attempts to understand the different dynamics of memory and identity conveyed by the cultural circulation of images, both personal and archival, in a postcolonial, multicultural and globalized world.

 

 

Click here to read more about the artist.