A Recap on the Past Tomorrows/Today Prizewinners

Tomorrows/Today is one of one of Investec Cape Town Art Fair's curated section featuring the works of cutting edge emerging and underrepresented artists across the world- acting as a forecast for future relevant practice and ideas.

 

Started as a special project in 2016, this section has become a highlight to the Investec Cape Town Art Fair weekend. The section includes a cash prize awarded to one artist by a panel of judges with the highest quality of work.

 

The 2024 section will be curated for the third time by Dr Mariella Franzoni.

 

Here is a recap of the past Tomorrows/Today winners.

 

 

Boemo Diale is a multi-disciplinary artist who grew up navigating different racial and socio-political structures in Rustenburg and the suburbs of Johannesburg as a young mixed-race woman.

As an exploration of identity, generational trauma, spirituality, and desire, at times suspended between the rural and the urban, cultural inheritance and autonomy, symbolism and reality, Diale’s visual narration takes on a dream-like articulation. Caught within the confines of a vessel or pushed up against the borders of canvas or Fabriano, her voluptuous obsidian and more pragmatic bodies take turns resisting against and then complying with the limitations both tangible and abstract, and are set against iridescent primordial environments - tropical cutouts and vivid graffitied universes. Rather than incongruent, her playful, bright and layered use of spray paint, ink, pastel and acrylic paint and form signals a deconstruction of struggle, vulnerability and fierce questioning about her sense of place impacted by maternal relationships, community and global tropes. There is reclaimed power and agency in her explosive palette and expression.

 

Read more about artist here.

 

 

 

Painting primarily with yarn, Ramkilawan’s still lifes and portraits are made using the rug-hooking technique. While studying, Ramkilawan grew despondent of the materials commonly associated with sculptural work because they felt too harsh for the tone she wanted her work to speak in. “I have always believed that disruption does not always have to be loud. It can be soft and meditative.

 

Adopted to distance Ramkilawan’s practice from the rigidity of metals, stones, and woods to the fluidity of tapestries, rug-hooking involves threading yarn into an open-weave fabric. By repeatedly threading the yarn through the material, loops come together to create a tufted picture with a rug-like texture.

Similar to mantra meditation, when the focus is on a mantra (which could be a syllable, word, or phrase), Ramkilawan’s technique requires her to focus her energy on repeating a particular motion. The subtle vibrations associated with repetition can be cathartically charged. “So while sitting in my apartment and appearing to play with wool all day, I’m doing internal work,” she says.

 

 

Politically cynical, materially superficial, thotty, and in love, the queer Indian femmes depicted in Ramkilawan’s scenes exist. However on Ramkilawan’s canvas, a speculative fiction utopia, they go uninterrupted by violence. Without the distraction of violence, the subjects in this body of work are free to focus on love. Documenting the moments in-between, Ramkilawan describes Heart 4 Sale as “a dedication to the habitual and everyday occurrences that have become significant since the presences of a significant other.” Charged with humour and doused in love, this Heart 4 Sale reflects the soft underbelly of love, lust and loathing. Whether visualising the act of dreading, embracing, seeking, losing or finding the affections of a lover, Heart 4 Sale is a testament to the often painful, sometimes awkward, but always strengthening effects of choosing to be vulnerable. So says Ramkilawan in closing: “I'm in love now and moving in relation to someone else. It has put a mirror up to me and helped me see myself. It's pushing my work in new directions and I'm excited to see where it takes me.”

 

Read more about the artist here.

 

 

 

Her intricate pieces typically present contemporary tableaus depicting dream-like moments that create a spectacle of the mundane and highlight the absurd. Instances of decapitation, seduction, and general debauchery are commonplace in her work, which uses the dramatically farcical to emphasise the humour and violence of our South African society. This subtle social commentary allows the viewer to examine the reality and disparity of South African everyday life where social dynamics are regularly questioned. The work is overwhelming, with multiple plot lines overlapping each other to create a complicated and complex visual narrative of violence, lust and overt drama.

 

 

Younge’s work varies in both size and format. While many pieces show a traditional landscape style scene, others take the form of calendar pages, Christmas stockings or playing cards. Some works are large and incredibly detailed, showing dozens of different interactions and scenes within one room; others are small and more intimate, often creating a spectacle of the ordinary and emphasizing the bizarreness of life. Every part of her process seems to mimic the convoluted imagery. The repetitive stabbing of wool transforms a violent gesture into a kind of meditation; a feminist act of reclaiming the craft-work of a previous generation of women. Similarly the titles parody cautionary tales passed down through families yet often disregarded. While she has not yet widely exhibited in conventional art spaces, her work has been featured on multiple international platforms, such as i-D and wePresent. Used in a variety of media such as album art and XR projects, Younge’s work depicting contemporary scenes infiltrated by historic South African imagery and highlighting our fraught relationship with the past.

 

Read more about the artist here.

 

 

 

Andy Robert (b. 1984, Les Cayes, Haiti) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Significant group shows and solo exhibitions include Michael Werner Gallery, London (2022); Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles (2017); the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago (2020); Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles (2019); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas (2018); and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2016).Recent grants, awards, and residencies include the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Artist Grant, New York (2020); MacDowell Colony Fellowship, Peterborough, New Hampshire (2020); Foundation for Contemporary Arts Roy Lichtenstein Award, New York (2019); The Studio Museum Harlem Artist-in-Residence, New York (2016–2017); Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Residency, Skowhegan, Maine (2016); and the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York (2015).

 

His work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin, Texas; Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles; The Studio Museum of Harlem, New York; and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Chicago.

 

Read more about the artist here.

 

 

 

Having specialized in painting in art school but always interested in form and texture, Makaza decided to develop his own hybrid medium which would enable him to unite his artistic goals. After experimenting with various materials, Makaza arrived at silicone a material which can be cast, painted with as well as woven and tied. Over the past eight years Makaza’s works progressively developed as an opportunity to speak both viscerally and philosophically to the issues Makaza finds compelling as a young Zimbabwean concerned with politics, history and power and their impact on daily lives of ordinary people as well as a globally engaged millennial. Resonating with traditional modes like weaving and tapestry but unequivocally contemporary, Makaza’s works articulate the conversation of what African and uniquely Zimbabwean contemporary can be – a paradigm internationally engaging and locally compelling. Makaza’s works has received early critical and collector acclaim, taking part in the 2018 survey of Zimbabwean contemporary art at Zeitz MoCAA, winning the Tomorrows/Today prize at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair in 2019, joining important institutional collections like that of Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden in Marrakech, Rollins College museum collection and noted private collections like Jorge Perez personal collection in Miami.

 

Read more about the artist here.

 

 

 

Usha Seejarim is best known for her reinterpretation of ordinary and domestic objects. Making use of common materials such as safety pins, wooden pegs, irons and brooms, her work has a distinctly Dadaist influence. Her compositions result from repetitive acts of mark making alluding to themes related to time, chance, space and displacement.

 

Usha Seejarim was born in 1974, South Africa. She received a B-Tech Degree in Fine Art from the University of Johannesburg in 1999 and a Master’s Degree in Fine Art at the University of The Witwatersrand (WITS) in 2008, both in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she currently lives and works.

Jackie Kurati (2017) | Circle Art Gallery

Jackie Karuti is an artist based in Nairobi, Kenya. Her work employs the use of drawing & moving images to generate thought and her experimental practice is founded on ideas around knowledge production & the depths of possibility enabled by radical imagination.

 

 

She was the recipient of the Follow Fluxus-After Fluxus scholarship in 2021 and the Henrike Grohs Award in 2020 which saw the release of her debut monograph Notes Movement Method published by Mousse. She is an alumnus of Àsìko, Lagos (2012), the roaming Pan African art school established by the late Bisi Silva to redress the frequently outdated or non-existent artistic and curatorial curricula at tertiary institutions across Africa.

 

Read more about the artist here.

 

 

Jackie Karuti is an artist based in Nairobi, Kenya. Her practice employs the use of new media through drawings, video and performance art. Her work is founded on ideas around knowledge production & accessibility as well as the depths of possibility enabled by radical imagination. Karuti is an alumnus of Àsìko, a roaming Pan African art school established by the late Bisi Silva, designed to redress the frequently outdated or non-existent artistic and curatorial curricula at tertiary institutions across Africa. Karuti has participated in several exhibitions, residencies and multidisciplinary projects such as In The Case of Books, programming the Out Film Festival-Nairobi and her online workspace, I’ve been working on some MAGIC.

 

Read more about the artist here.

 

 

Masimba Hwati was born in 1982 in Harare, Zimbabwe. Hwati currently lives and works in Michigan, USA. Hwati graduated from the Harare Polytechnic in 2003, and has continued to live and work in the capital city. In 2017 he obtained a Certificate in Building Indigenous Knowledge Systems for Development at Coady International Institute, St Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Canada. Hwati recently completed his Master’s degree in Fine Art from the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, which culminated in a MFA thesis exhibition titled Dry Socks in a Submerged Canoe at Stamps Gallery in Ann Arbour, Michigan in 2019.

 

In 2016 Hwati was the winner of the Cape Town Art Fair’s curated Special Projects Section: Tomorrows/Today, with his solo presentation: don’t worry be happy. The presentation formed part of Consuming Us, an exhibition curated by Azu Nwagbogu and Ruth Simbao. In 2015 he participated in the Zimbabwean Cultural Centre of Detroit (ZCCD) Artist Exchange programme, partnered with the Witt Visiting Artist Program at the Stamp School of Art and Design, University of Michigan, USA.

 

Read more about the artist here.