Gallery Momo in Rosebank came alive with colour and artwork on the evening of June 12, celebrating the opening of solo exhibition, Indlela ibomvu, by Lusanda Ndita, ABSA’S 2024 L’Atelier Gerard Sekoto award winner.

Working across photography, printmaking, and collage, Ndita engages with fragmentation and reconstruction, presenting images that unfold as accumulating stories.

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The exhibition, Indlela ibomvu, a Nguni idiom meaning the path is ready to be travelled, reflects on migratory trajectories that displaced black men from familial spaces under colonial and apartheid labour regimes. These movements rendered paternal presence fragmentary and mediated through photographs, records, and memory.

The visual artist explained that his grandfather’s dompass, which forms part of the exhibition, involved a lot of learning about his family history and tree. “My mother was my first consultant in my family history, but I then had to do more research within the family to find out more about my grandfather, because he died when she was only 8 years old. This then led to me finding documents like his dompass and other material.”

The exhibition traces the journeys of absent paternal figures, while reimagining the archive as a living, shifting space, one that holds both presence and absence.

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Through his work, Ndita interrogates how masculinity is constituted within conditions of absence. After discovering his grandfather’s apartheid era dompas, it became both an evidentiary object and a conceptual rupture.

The exhibition runs from June 13 to July 11at Gallery Momo.

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