Ukubekezela: Mapping a Fractured Terrain

By Thembeka Heidi Sincuba – Reflecting on Senzeni Marasela’s recent show, Waiting and Remembering, at UJ FADA Gallery

Introduction

“Ukubekezela: Mapping a Fractured Terrain” lies at the intersection of art, memory, and public spatial justice. Rooted in black feminist epistemology, Senzeni Marasela’s exhibition maps absence and resilience through the figure of Theodorah and her red dress. This article provides a detailed exploration of key themes and takes a deeper look at how Marasela’s work repositions the personal and collective in fractured urban geographies.

Artist Profile & Exhibition Context

**Senzeni Marasela** (b. 1977, Thokoza, Gauteng) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work spans performance, textiles, photography, installation, and video. A graduate of the Wits School of Arts (1998), her work engages deeply with themes of memory—especially relating to Black South African womanhood and displacement. Her art has been exhibited at institutions including MoMA New York, MFA Boston, and the 2015 Venice Biennale.

In June 2025, Marasela presented “Waiting and Remembering” at the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (FADA) Gallery at the University of Johannesburg. The show was supported by her affiliations with VIAD Research and the Thami Mnyele Foundation, reinforcing her commitment to art as a form of public memory work.

The Figure of Theodorah & Black Feminist Cartography

Lead by curator Refilwe Nkomo’s framework—known as Maru Musi—the exhibition embraced anti-archive principles that reclaimed public space as a site of belonging, justice, homing, and refusal.

The central character, **Theodorah**, first appears in 2002 and represents a Black woman searching for her missing husband, Gebane, since 2004. In 2013, Marasela began using a red dress—iphinifa elibomvu—as a key performative tool. Walking Johannesburg’s urban, memory-infused terrain, she symbolically mapped loss through textile structures.

Theodorah’s red dress disrupts the landscape: at JFK Airport, Marasela was profiled—seen as a mark of poverty rather than artistic intent—revealing how African Black female presence is mediated through racial optics in institutional spaces.

Textiles as Mnemonic Cartography

Textile pieces—blankets, hanging fabrics, woven rings—act as mnemonic devices tracing cycles of erasure and return. They emerge as “intimate cartographic interventions” (Marasela’s own term), mapping absences of people, histories, and infrastructures across fractured terrains.

Mine dumps around Soweto become visible as concentric rings. Red Xs mark Gebane’s “last known location.” Blankets (itshali), once colonial imports from Scotland, are now reclamations—mourning cloths, lived documents, and symbolic campfires of communal loss.

Ukubekezela & Ukukhumbula: Ritualised Technologies

The Zulu concept of ukubekezela (more than “patience”) and ukukhumbula (a spiritual practice of remembering) sit at the exhibition’s core. They signify practices of spiritual endurance, collective witnessing, and psychic fortitude—especially as feminist acts of survival and refusal.

“These aren’t costumes,” Marasela reminds us—they are “propositions, documents, mourning cloths.” Her red dress becomes a social argument embodied in the world, transforming how we witness Black female presence in postcolonial contexts.

Landscape, Memory & Spatial Justice

Johannesburg’s layered terrains—fractured by apartheid spatial planning, mining toxic legacies, and gendered displacement—serve as a living archive for Marasela’s work. Her mapping is not geo-referenced by streets but by missing bodies, lost memories, collective grief, and dislocated labor histories. It is a cartography of absence.

By granting sensory presence to absences, her work invites viewers to consider the psychic geographies shaped by Black female endurance, colonial histories, and institutional exclusion.

Conclusion

Ukubekezela: Mapping a Fractured Terrain demands that viewers confront the historical wounds woven into South Africa’s urban and gendered spaces. Marasela’s artistic cartography transforms mourning into spatial justice and materializes memory as activist art.

By mapping absence through repeated acts of endurance (ukubekezela) and remembering (ukukhumbula), she audaciously reclaims space, visibility, and spiritual poise. Taking place in venues like the FADA Gallery, her work calls not only for remembrance but for the reconfiguration of how we acknowledge and respond to spatial fracture.

thanks for reading for more news visit our website

This post by News 24