Madragoa is happy to present a dialogue between the works of Buhlebezwe Siwani and Belén Uriel at Investec Cape Town Art Fair, in booth C16, between February 16th-19th.

Buhlebezwe Siwani (Johannesburg, South Africa, 1987) lives and works between Cape Town and Amsterdam.

Buhlebezwe Siwani works with performance, photography, sculpture and installation. Siwani’s work interrogates the patriarchal framing of the black female body and black female experience within the South African context. As an initiated Sangoma, a spiritual healer that works within the space of the death and the living, Siwani focused her artistic practice into rituality and the relationship between Christianity and African spirituality. Central to her work is her own body, which operates in multiple registers as subject, object, form, medium, material, language and site. Her work can be described, although not literally, as the documentation of a diverse set of performances, which are rendered through vi- deo, photography, sculpture, installation and works on paper. Each of her projects deals with the relationship between ancestral rituals and modern life, touching social and political topics, such as the female body, black communities, histories of colonization and the paradoxes of our contemporary society, all seen through the filter of the artist’s own biography and experience.

Buhlebezwe Siwani was the winner of the 2021 Standard Bank Young Artists Awards in the category of Visual Arts and she will open her solo show Iyeza at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg the 23rd of February.

Buhlebezwe Siwani completed her BAFA at the Wits School of Arts in Johannesburg in 2011 and her MFA at the Michealis School of Fine Arts in 2015. Recent solo and group exhibitions include: Iyeza, National Arts Festival, Makhanda; Toronto Biennale, Toronto; Impilo Inegama, No Man’s Art Gallery, Amsterdam; Rethinking Nature, Madre, Napoli (all 2022); Dedisa ubumnyama, Cairns Art Gallery, Cairns; The Power of My Hands, Pa- ris Museum of Modern Art, Paris; Goddesses of Healing, Mbassy, Hamburg; Casablanca Biennial, Casablanca (all 2021) Inkanyamba, Galeria Municipal de Arte de Almada; Witness: Afro Perspectives from the Jorge M. Perez collec- tion, Miami; 14th Curitiba Biennial, Curitiba; Viral portraits, Moderna galerija/Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana; Materiality, Iziko National Gallery, Cape Town (all 2020); Present Passing: South by Southeast, Osage Art Foundation, Hong Kong; Bamako Encounters, Mali; Ngoma: Art and Cosmology, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, Cosmopolis #2: Rethinking the Human, Centre Pompidou, Paris (all 2019).

The collective iQhiya, of which Buhlebezwe Siwani is part, participated in Documenta 14, 2017.

Belén Uriel was born in Madrid, in Spain in 1974 and she lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal.

Her practice is centered on household objects and how the way we interrelate with them can condition our social habits. She concentrates on the sculptural qualities of materials such as glass and metal in the rendering of organic shapes that are originated by the design of objects that would accommodate, sustain or have a relation with the human body. These elements, rearranged by the artist, seem to transform into anatomical parts themselves, partially reconstructing and going back to the bodies that indi- rectly inspired their form.

Her most recent solo and duo exhibitions include: Jamais o Acaso, UPPERCUT, Lisbon (2022); Green Rim, Cascina I.D.E.A, Agrate Conturbia (2022); ANTES, DESPUES, AYER, MIENTRAS, AHORA, Madragoa, Lisbon (2020); Bonança, CA2M, Madrid (2019); Tandem: Gabriel Abrantes and Belén Uriel, Alexander and Bonin, New York (2019); Es- tudos do Labirinto, with Ana Santos, Museo da Marinha, Lisbon (2018) Qualia, Sismógrafo, Oporto (2018).

Selected group exhibitions include: Les Péninsules Démarrées, FRAC - Nouvelle Aquitaine MÉCA, Bordeaux; Ninguém. Só eu. Centro de Arte Oliva, São João da Madeira (both 2022); The Third Bank, Bienal Ano Zero, Coimbra; There will never be a door. You are inside, Collection Teixeira de Freitas, Fundación Santander, Madrid (both 2019); Vacío Perfecto, MUSAC, León, (2017); Art en Transit, Muxart, Espai d’Art i Creación Contemporanis, Martorell (2016); Art en Trànsit, Cerdanyola Art Museum, Barcelona (2015); Home, Hollybush Gardens, London (2014).

She was awarded the 6th Audemars Piguet Prize, ARCO Madrid (2018); Gulbenkian Foundation Scolarship, Lisbon (2015); “The Art and Research” Project, Montehermoso Contemporary Art Centre, Vitoria, Spain (2011); MUSAC Artistic Creation Grant, MU- SAC, León (2010-11); Matadero Contemporary Art Creation Grant, Matadero Art Centre, Madrid, (2010).