Biography

Through painting, sculpture, and spatial intervention, Simphiwe Ndzube stages an introduction to his imaginative universe: the Mine-moon. He states, "We begin in the real world and through interaction with the work enter a fabulist tale in progress. I’ve attempted to create the genesis of a cosmology that finds itself in the uncharted lands and trackless seas. In it exists characters, gods, and demigods—different people influenced by the post-apartheid black South African experience. It emerges from the tradition of magical realism and is expanding to points currently unknown." Narrative influences include Ben Okri, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Gabriel García Márquez, Italo Calvino, and Zakes Mda. In particular, Ndzube highlights Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community by Wendy B Faris and Lois Parkinson Zamora which describes magical realism as "a mode suited to exploring—and transgressing—boundaries, whether the boundaries are ontological, political, geographical or generic. [It] facilitates the fusion, or coexistence, of possible worlds, spaces, [and] systems that would be irreconcilable in other modes." Ndzube's recent body of work tells a story of power and conflict—within it is a focus on the people affected by abuses of power; these figures are on their own search for freedom, love, and meaning in a setting that has deemed them, as Frantz Fanon phrased it, the wretched of the earth.