Isintu Sithi, 2025
Varnish on wood
96 cm x 181 cm
Artist’s Statement
In Zulu culture, there is a rule that women must sit on grass mats /ucansi. Not benches, not chairs. A woman seated at the same height as a man, knees facing him, is considered a provocation. There is another rule that she must not look at him directly. Her eyes belong on the floor.
I am a Zulu woman who grew up in KwaZulu-Natal, raised entirely within Zulu culture. These are not rules I read about. They are rules I lived inside.
The women in this work sit on the floor. But they look back. They know they are being watched and they do not look away. They submit to the position culture assigned them, but they refuse what comes with it: the passivity, the downcast eyes, the erasure of self. Their gaze is the resistance. Their hands, placed over their own bodies, reclaim what has been routinely sexualised and surveyed.
This work does not pretend the tradition does not exist. It lives inside it. But it insists that submission and resistance can occupy the same body at the same time and that leadership has never been determined by gender.
