uBettina Wethu, 2026
Oil on board
118,5 cm x 84 cm
Artist’s Statement
uBettina Wethu sits inside a discomfort that South Africa prefers to keep at arm’s length. This is not a gentle picture. It holds a moment of raw intimacy that exposes something we still struggle to name honestly: the resentment, the contradiction, of a society that has always needed Black bodies to nurture and sustain it yet has never truly seen those bodies as fully human.
I wanted to bring what feels historically hidden; what lives quietly in the in-between of post-apartheid promises, right to the surface. This isn’t about clean academic critique. It’s about looking at what happens when the structures we live inside show their cracks, and when someone refuses to let the labels of race, gender, or social standing manage the conversation. uBettina Wethu is in the interests of what opens up when we let this moment be uncomfortable and intimate without rushing to resolve it. That’s where a real dialogue might begin, a situation within the ‘Third Space’ (Homi Bhabha 2009).
