Soty’efileyo* (or The Cannibal)
2025
Oil on Canvas
70 cm x 50 cm
More Cameos from The Frontier .
*We’ll eat the dead.
… remind me to tell you about iZimu.
Athi painting in studio, Hogsback 2026
Grateful for conversations, for long walks, for colors and quiet and clock that //
Bodyland presence in sight sound and spirit, much needed dropping in. Thank you for the welcome and the space to sit on the mountain ⛰️
#120mm #MediumFormat
WHATIFTHEWORLD invites you to join us at our gallery on Wednesday, 18 February at 11:00 am for an artist-led walkabout of ‘Cameos from the Frontier’, a solo exhibition by Athi-Patra Ruga.
🗓️ Walkabout: 18 February 2026, 11:00
📍WHATIFTHEWORLD, 16 Buiten Street, Cape Town 8001
Athi-Patra Ruga
‘Tshotsh’ubekho (I’m happy you exist)’, 2025
Copper foil, lead solder, onglaze fired, stained glass, steel frame
58.5 x 42 x 1 cm
1 of 1 + 1 AP
Cameos from The Frontier
… studio jams (or a visitation) with a dead poet .
As I worked in the studio, a quiet conversation unfolded in my mind. I thought of St John Page Yako, the Lovedale poet of the 1950s, who wrote a powerful poem called Iglasi-glass. As I shape stained glass, his words echo in me. Glass, like skin, is layered, flesh and glass both hold a delicate duality. You can scrape it, paint it, transform it. And when I delineate anatomy with lines, it’s a re-membering, a re-assembling of body and being. In this act, I “Frankenstein” these glass pieces, a self-invention, a reconstitution of a new portrait - being born of light and memory.
Athi-Patra Ruga , Hogsback 2026
Cameos from The Frontier.
… epiphany eGompo.
These windows offer belonging. Or the aspiration toward belonging. There I was purched on pews at our family church in Gompo, East London (this is gonna be confusing), where I encountered a window dedicated to Mam Archdeacon Mfenyana. The Annunciation, Gabriel and Maria, depicted as Black. The church insisted.
Raised between isiko and Anglicanism, I have always lived with the abundance and tension of being in and out, inhabiting multiple worlds, never fully resting inside one, as a rule.
My stained glass avatars upend the prestige of the medium. I attempt to beatify them, not into sainthood, but into visibility, returning them to the people who live beneath the light.
Stained glass has since become a form of portraiture for me, not just representation, but self-invention and preservation. Interior/Exterior is made manifest through solar energy passing through prismatic glass, a material historically reserved for religious, nationalist, and moral tales.
These figures are not saintly or institutional bodies. They luxuriate in contradiction, avatars of excess, vulnerability, defiance, and fantasy.
📣WHATIFTHEWORLD is delighted to announce ‘Cameos from the Frontier’, a solo exhibition by Athi-Patra Ruga, opening on Saturday, 14 February from 10:00 – 13:00.
To request a catalogue, please contact [email protected]
🗓️ Exhibition Opening: 14 February 2026, 10h00 – 13h00
📍WHATIFTHEWORLD, 16 Buiten Street, Cape Town, 8001
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Athi-Patra Ruga
‘The Entered Apprentice’, 2026
Copper foil, lead solder, onglaze fired, stained glass, steel frame
59 x 41 x 1 cm
@athipatra
Cameos from The Frontier.
…on statecraft .
In 2013, I began working with stained glass, drawn to its history, its drama, and its strange authority. I was interested in how this medium has so often been used to glorify churches, empires, and nation-states… and what happens when you twist that language into something else.
My early explorations began with an imagined story-world riffing off the Pan-Africanist idea of Azania. A satirical mirror where coats of arms, national flora and fauna … beauty queens could be exaggerated, distorted, and remade.
I think about this often because I was born in Mthatha, in the (unrecognised) Republic of the Transkei — a place shaped by borders that were invented, enforced, and then erased again. That history of invented nations and fragile myths sits quietly inside the glass.
Stained glass, for me, becomes a way to question what we inherit, what we’re told to worship, and what kinds of new visions we might still build.
Athi-Patra Ruga. Hogsback. 2016
#cameosfromthefrontier
#thefuturewhitewomenofazania
#stainedglass
Honoured and deeply grateful to be part of HERE: Pride and Belonging in African Art at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.
In this exhibition, LGBTQ+ artists from Africa and its diaspora come together to celebrate identity, family, and joy. My work here is a reflection of self-invention as self-preservation, with Future as a verb.
In this image, I propose myself as Versatile Queen Ivy, an avatar inspired by Rihanna and the legend of Lady Godiva. Like ivy, I climb against gravity, thriving in every crack and crevice, and embracing resilience and adaptability.
With gratitude to the curators, artists, and communities that made this possible. We are here!
Versatile Queen: A Transhuman Proposal 2016
Wool and thread on tapestry canvas
Museum purchase, 2024-8-1
@smithsonianafricanartmuseum
#HEREExhibition #AfricanArt #WeAreHere #thefuturewhitewomenofazania
Have you listened to our latest podcast episode featuring Athi-Patra Ruga?
Athi-Patra Ruga (b. 1984; Umtata, South Africa) is one of the few artists working in South Africa today whose work has adopted the trope of myth as a contemporary response to the post-Apartheid era. Ruga creates alternative identities and uses these avatars as a way to parody and critique the existing political and social status quo. Ruga’s artistic approach to creating myths and alternate realities is in some way an attempt to view the traumas of the last 200 years of colonial history from a place of detachment – at a farsighted distance where wounds can be contemplated outside of personalised grief and subjective defensiveness.
🎧 Hit play on all streaming platforms now – link in bio.
👇 Tag an emerging artist who needs to hear this!
#LatitudesPodcast #TheVoiceOfArtFromAfrica #Athi-PatraRuga #ArtPodcast #PodcastSeason2
