Zenáeca Singh

Zenaéca Singh (b. 2000 in South Africa) recontextualises personal and public archival images using sugar and molasses to speak to the exploitative labour practices of indenture that led to the settling of Indian nationals in South Africa during the country’s colonial period. By making this otherwise erased history central to her practice, Singh also explores identity construction, gendered representations, domesticity and place-making in the context of colonial and apartheid violence. Through this process, she explores and situates her own identity and familial history.

Singh recently completed an MFA at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2024, where she also received multiple awards during her BFA studies. She is an Accelerated Transformation of the Academic Programme (ATAP) Fellow. Her practice has developed through an engagement with archives and the histories, absences and silences they contain, while seeking alternative ways of approaching colonial pasts through artistic practice. As Singh explains, ‘The studio is my garden space. So I was just really interested in that idea of that garden being this living archive and moving away from a colonial archive to use artistic practice to find other ways of working with colonial pasts.’

Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions including DECADE: 10 Years of Guns & Rain, Johannesburg (2024); Investec Cape Town Art Fair, with Guns & Rain, Cape Town (2024); Us, a two-person exhibition with Bougaard at Guns & Rain, Johannesburg (2023); Tracing the Home, Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town (2022); and Smoke & Ash: The Jagger Library Memorial Exhibition, University of Cape Town (2022). More recent exhibitions include Into One’s Own, Entangled, Senses and Portals into Domestic Worlds (2024), as well as Greatest Hits at the Leeuwenhof Slave Lodge Remembrance Gallery (2023).

Contributor: Bulelwa Kunene (A Gathering)

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