We’re proud to welcome Mahube Diseko as a 2025 BLVCK BLOCK resident.
Diseko’s multidisciplinary practice began in photography and video, with early works exploring identity concerning race, gender, and sexuality within broader societal contexts. Diseko gravitates toward non-traditional methods, constantly seeking alternative ways of making.
Her practice has recently expanded into textile and text-based sculpture. Diseko creates sculptural pieces using underwear as a canvas and material, embedding intimate, text-based reflections that harden into form. These works negotiate the space between delicacy and structure, drawing strength from vulnerability.
Rooted in confessional art and feminine aesthetics, the work draws on lived experience to reflect on love, loss, grief, memory, and the body. Through a combination of language and form, Diseko opens up space for both personal and collective reflection.
We look forward to supporting this journey and witnessing the evolution of a powerful and deeply thoughtful practice.
We’re proud to welcome Tatenda Magaisa as a 2025 BLVCK BLOCK resident.
Johannesburg-based artist, writer, researcher, and cultural producer, Magaisa works across various mediums. Her practice draws from horror, fantasy, and sci-fi genres to explore the presence of Black women in popular culture, the burden of surplus labour, and cultural dominance.
Rooted in speculative world-building and grounded by a sketchbook practice, her work often begins with text and image, expanding into meditative paintings where reality and fantasy blur. She finds resolution in a restrained colour palette, with reds and pinks currently dominating to shift the atmosphere and push the work beyond reality.
We’re excited to witness her growth and the new directions in her work during her time with us.
We’re truly so grateful and honestly still a little in awe. The response to our open call was beyond anything we anticipated.
The depth, range, and thoughtfulness of each submission left a lasting impression on us. We’re inspired by the strength of practice, the generosity of spirit, and the clarity of vision across the continent. Thank you to every artist who took the time to apply. You reminded us why a Pan-African creative future is not just possible; it’s already unfolding.
The map shows the continent with pinned locations where most of the applications came from; to give some context to the incredible spread of submissions we received.
With love and deep respect,
BLVCK BLOCK.
🔥 NAMES LIKE RIVERS, FACES LIKE FIRE 🔥
A group exhibition opening 9 August 2025
📍 Women's Jail, Constitution Hill, Johannesburg
⌚ 17:30 for 18:00
Curated by Bontle Tau, Bokang Motshabi, and Sam Ngcobo (@bontle_tau , @jpegb_@sam__ngcobo )
In collaboration with KOLLECTIVA and BLVCK BLOCK
There are names that flow like rivers - quietly carrying memory, resistance, and story.
There are faces that burn like fire - refusing to be forgotten, even in silence.
NAMES LIKE RIVERS, FACES LIKE FIRE is not just an exhibition.
It is a gathering. A remembering.
A reckoning with land, lineage and language.
In the ruins of colonial forgetting and in the residue of displacement, this exhibition brings together two dynamic collectives whose work interrogate identity, memory, and experience within the South African context.
Through painting, sculpture, installation, photography and performance video, our artists speak to the in-between - where grief becomes beauty, where ancestry becomes protest, where presence becomes power
Featuring :
Teboho Mokhothu @teboho_mokhothu_walesoro
Sibenoxolo Foji @foji_art
Jacobeth Selinga @jacobeth_selinga_art
Omolemo Rammile @rammileo_
Mbali Mdikane @_quiing
🍷Refreshments will be served
In addition to the exhibition, an artist walkabout will take place on the 10th of August.
🖤 Let this be a love letter to collective becoming.
Photograph on artwork : @foji_art
Artwork : @neotheku_art
#NamesLikeRiversFacesLikeFire #Kollectiva #BLVCKBLOCK #ContemporaryArtSouthAfrica #ConstitutionHill #ExhibitionOpening
Last week, we had the privilege of walking alongside Masindi as he guided us through the deeply personal and thought-provoking body of work he has created. In this collection, Masindi delves into complex themes of grief, loss, culture, and the enduring impact of colonialism—a layered exploration of our shared history and its emotional and psychological residue.
What makes this body of work particularly striking is his use of the chiaroscuro painting technique, famously mastered by painters such as Caravaggio and Rembrandt. Chiaroscuro—literally meaning “light-dark” in Italian—employs strong contrasts between light and shadow to heighten dramatic effect and create a sense of volume and depth. In Masindi’s hands, this technique becomes more than just an aesthetic device; it is a metaphor for emotional and historical tension. The darkness often represents loss, trauma, or erasure, while the light serves as a counterpoint—shedding illumination on identity, resilience, and memory.
Through this visual language, Masindi invites viewers into intimate, almost sacred moments that reveal the silent burdens of colonial inheritance and the quiet strength of cultural continuity. The figures in his paintings are not merely subjects—they are vessels of memory, caught in the interplay between mourning and resistance. The chiaroscuro doesn’t only dramatize their form—it reveals the soul of a people wrestling with the shadows of history.
In echoing the techniques of European master painters to tell African stories, Masindi cleverly reclaims a traditionally Western visual language and redirects it toward an African narrative. This not only challenges the canon but also subverts colonial modes of seeing, turning the gaze inward—toward ancestral wisdom, personal grief, and collective healing.
His work demands quiet reflection, not just on what is seen but on what is felt. It is a powerful reminder that history does not end with the facts—it lingers in the body, in ritual, and in the imagination. Masindi’s use of chiaroscuro is thus not just stylistic—it is spiritual, political, and profoundly human.
What Remains Blooms is a celebration of creative endurance — a tribute to young Black contemporary artists in Johannesburg who continue to rise, create, and bloom in the face of life’s many shifts and seasons.
This gathering honours the strength that remains after uncertainty, the beauty that persists through discomfort, and the fire that fuels Black artistic expression. The works on show reflect personal transitions, quiet resilience, and the pursuit of joy.
Exhibition Opening details:
Date: 7 June 2025
Time: 13:00
Venue: BLVCK BLOCK Marketplace, Victoria Yards
Join us in our farewell showing at our Victoria Yards space to witness a moment of growth, memory, and the unshakable spirit of young artists who dare to keep blooming.
'Feast of Flesh and Prayer' Opens 31 May 2025, 11am at Ellis House Gallery.
A Solo Exhibition by Masindi Nafisa Mbolekwa,
In association with @blockblvck and @ellishouseartbuilding
~ a deeply personal body of work. I am privelaged to be in a position to share this work and hope that something in it rests in the hearts of it's audience. ~
'Feast of Flesh and Prayer' brings together a body of work built on grief, hope and a deeply poetic analysis of surrender and continuous acts of "salving" as methods for resistance against the metaphysical deaths that manifest and saturate contemporary life from a postcolonial and existential perspective.
In presenting and reflecting on migratory histories, Xhosa material practices, stolen agencies, natal alienations, familial violences, false geographies, and a recontextualized spiritual "Sickness Unto Death" (Kierkegaard, 1849) Mbolekwa manifests a prayer, a body of work that is in it's very realisation a salve, a bulwark, a hope.
Email [email protected] and [email protected] with event info.
Direct enquiries to @masindi.nafisa
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#artexhibition #oilpainting #figurativepainting #abstractpainting #indigenousart #materialart #xhosa #southafricanartist #independentartist
'Feast of Flesh and Prayer' brings together a body of work built on grief, hope and a deeply poetic analysis of surrender and continuous acts of "salving" as methods for resistance against the metaphysical deaths that manifest and saturate contemporary life from a postcolonial and existential perspective.
In presenting and reflecting on migratory histories, Xhosa material practices, stolen agencies, natal alienations, familial violences, false geographies, and a recontextualized spiritual "Sickness Unto Death" (Kierkegaard, 1849) Mbolekwa manifests a prayer, a body of work that is in it's very realisation a salve, a bulwark, a hope.
Opening:
Ellis House Gallery - 31 May
@masindi.nafisa@blockblvck@ellishouseartbuilding
BLVCK BLOCK is pleased to host Canvas Capital for the official launch of their Art Collection Stokvel.
Canvas Capital is interested in how collective art investments can make art collection more accessible for people across income levels. The platform places people in financial and cultural community with others who share similar affordability and curiosity for art. The platform is for collectors, by collectors.
To learn more about Canvas Capital, visit: @ccstokvel
Join the circle where art meets community!
Event details:
Date: 01 June 2025, First Sunday
Time: 11’am – 1’pm
Venue: BLVCK BLOCK, Victoria Yards
To receive your onboarding package ahead of the event, please RSVP with the link on our bio.
We will keep a seat open for you!
#artcollecting #stokvel
The BLVCK BLOCK residency applications are now open!
Calling all Johannesburg-based artists looking to expand their skills and collaborate with fellow creatives.
CLOSING DATE: 17 MAY 2025
To apply:
Complete the form - link in the bio.
Please have your CV, Portfolio and artist statement ready.
6 or 12-month residency including:
* Studio space
* Art supplies
* A monthly stipend
Check out our website to learn more about us!
Link in bio
If you have any questions contact us at: [email protected]
Visit “Echoes of Home” exhibiting at Artivist, 7 Reserve Street, Braamfontein to explore the curator, Sam Ngcobo’s vision of home. The exhibition will be open to the public until the 28th of April 2025.
