Gallery Momo in Rosebank was abuzz on the evening of June 12, with guests and art enthusiasts present for the opening night of the 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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Indlela ibomvu is a Nguni idiom meaning the path is ready to be travelled.

The exhibition 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 said that his grandfather’s dompas forms part of the exhibition.

“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 eight years old.

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This then led to me finding documents like his dompas 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.

Through his work, Ndita interrogates how masculinity is constituted within conditions of absence.

“Finding his grandfather’s apartheid–era dompas turned it into both proof of a painful past and a powerful challenge to how that past is understood.”

The exhibition will be from 13 June to 11 July at Gallery Momo

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