Ukubekezela Art: 5 Essential Insights into Senzeni Marasela’s “Waiting and Remembering”
Johannesburg, South Africa – Earlier this month, the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (FADA) Gallery at the University of Johannesburg inaugurated a dual exhibition of Senzeni Marasela’s Waiting and Remembering, running from 7 to 22 June. This powerful display is anchored in the concept of ukubekezela—a Zulu term that expresses resilience, endurance, and ritualised patience.
Table of Contents
1. Art as Public Memory through Ukubekezela
Senzeni Marasela, a multidisciplinary artist born in 1977 in Thokoza, Gauteng, has consistently positioned her artistic practice at the intersection of personal history and collective memory. Her work draws from the lived experiences of Black South African women — their silences, erasures, and persistent acts of endurance — using performance, photography, video, textiles, and installation as tools of testimony. In Waiting and Remembering, Marasela doesn’t merely depict memory; she activates it, crafting an embodied archive that resists forgetting.
Within this framework, ukubekezela, a Zulu term that transcends its literal meaning of “patience,” becomes a guiding philosophy. It signifies a deeply gendered form of emotional labor — a spiritual resilience forged in the face of historical injustice. For Marasela, art is not just representation but resistance; it is where memory refuses to fade, where loss is given form, and where grief becomes a language.
In the exhibition, art functions as a living document — one that doesn’t simply recall the past but interrogates the conditions under which certain stories are remembered while others are systematically erased. The careful curation of materials, especially textiles and found objects, underscores the intimacy and materiality of remembrance. By stitching, layering, and preserving fragments, Marasela constructs what scholar Saidiya Hartman might call “critical fabulation” — a reimagining of historical absence through speculative and affective means.
Moreover, her method challenges Western frameworks of archiving and museology. Rather than presenting static artifacts or linear timelines, Waiting and Remembering invites viewers into a cyclical, relational space where personal grief overlaps with national trauma, and where silence can be as revealing as speech. In this sense, the gallery is transformed — no longer a sterile institutional space but a site of mourning, witnessing, and spiritual return.
Through the language of ukubekezela, Marasela reclaims time itself. The work resists the urgency of capitalist production and the speed of contemporary life. Instead, it insists on slowness — on repetition, on waiting, on dwelling in discomfort — as a radical act. Her figures don’t just remember; they inhabit memory, returning again and again to the moment of rupture, not for closure, but for fidelity to what was lost.
Ultimately, Marasela’s practice offers a counter-archive to dominant historical narratives. It centers the lived, the felt, and the remembered over the officially recorded. Her art is not about documenting history, but about keeping it alive — unresolved, painful, and deeply human.
2. Theodorah: An Embodied Cartography
At the heart of the exhibition is Theodorah, Marasela’s alter ego who, since 2002, searches Johannesburg for her missing husband, Gebane. Dressed in red—iphinifa elibomvu—she traverses spaces that echo apartheid-era spatial violence. This isn’t nostalgia, but endurance embodied. As Marasela noted during a walkabout, these rings, blankets and strings on display map absences, not streets—X marks not what is there but what is gone.
3. Maru Musi Framework & Black Feminist Memory
Curator and researcher Refilwe Nkomo situates the exhibition within Maru Musi, a black feminist, anti-museum methodology. Rejecting Western archival dominance, the show becomes a space of belonging, resistance, refusal and justice. Material elements—textiles, red wool blankets (itshali)—are not costumes but living documents, mourning cloths that carry both personal and collective histories.
4. Colonial Textiles as Palimpsest
The itshali—a handwoven Scottish-import blanket—layers colonial entanglement with contemporary reclamation. Red wool circles reference mine dumps in Soweto, evoking environmental wreckage and abandoned bodies. This “intimate cartographic intervention” reconfigures landscape through memory, occupation and disappearances.
5. Ukubekezela & Ukukhumbula as Methodology
The exhibition’s title summons genealogies of spiritual endurance. Ukubekezela is not passive waiting but a charged, ritualful suspension; ukukhumbula is not simple recall, but summoning the dead, the disappeared. Together they form recursive strategies that refuse facile reading—they demand attunement, not mastery. Through Theodorah’s presence, the exhibition maps Johannesburg as fractured yet inhabited by resilience.
Why This Exhibition Matters
Waiting and Remembering is more than an art exhibition—it’s an embodiment of cultural memory and feminist resistance. Marasela’s work resists assimilation into institutional spaces that often flatten lived experience into digestible narratives. Here, the body is both archive and site of refusal. The red garment worn by Marasela in airports, where she experienced racial profiling, becomes a statement: visibility as vulnerability, endurance as resistance.
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External References
This article is part of our cultural arts series exploring memory, space and Black feminist methodologies. Thanks to FADA Gallery’s public walkabout with Senzeni Marasela and Refilwe Nkomo.
