Zenaéca Singh

So pleased to have been welcomed to this wonderful showcasing with @museumrietberg A Kind of Paradise: Colonial Era Photography in Contemporary Art. Showing four different works: ‘Along the South Coast’ (2025), an installation of 20 sugar-paste postcards commissioned by the Musuem, as well as some sugar-glass works ‘Finding My Self’ (2025) and ‘From every nook and cranny’ (2024) and lastly ‘The Sweet Successors’ (2022) which is now part of the Musuem collection. The show will be on view until 6th September! Thank you to @nanina_guyer_ @lisamaria_11 @martinsollberger and the Museum Rietberg team for this incredible event.

So honoured to have been part of @sharjahart residency cohort 2 with some of the most inspiring people 🤍 I came back home with so many memories and (not enough) books ✍️ Thank you Tima, Nada and Momen, the absolute dream team for making this all possible and to my fellow artists for making everything so bearable the past two months. I mainly read, but I managed to play a little bit with sugar, finding new ways to sculpt and mould it, and painting waves with date molasses. @gunsandrain

Made some special new additions to the matriarch series which I got to debut at 1:54 in October (slides 2-6 of the first 5 made)🤎 These vintage framed paintings are made entirely out of sugar paste with molasses and preserved in resin🍯 Email @gunsandrain for more info Photo credits for slides 2-6 is @brooklynnnnorkie 🌟

Throwback to Browning the Archive 🤎 can’t believe it’s already been a year, but getting ready for the next chapter.✨ Incredibly grateful to have completed this body of work with the most amazing support system. 🤍🤍🤍 Some highlights from Masters: Install shots by the lovely @miathom_photography 📸 São Paulo trip 🌞 Moments in studio 🎨 Research trip to Gandhi Luthuli Documentation Centre 📚

Zenaéca Singh🇿🇦 the first contributor to Ají Vol. II Unbounded Lines, is currently presenting at 1-54 (@154artfair ) this weekend! Zenaéca Singh explores the sugar economy’s complex legacy in South Africa, investigating its connections to migration, colonialism, labour exploitation, and the gendered dynamics of the domestic sphere. The artist holds an MFA from the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Michaelis School of Fine Art, where she also received multiple awards for her BFA. Singh is an Accelerated Transformation of the Academic Programme (ATAP) Fellow. Selected exhibitions include Greatest Hits at Leeuwenhof Slave Lodge Remembrance Gallery, in collaboration with the Association of Visual Arts (2023). Recent exhibitions include Entangled (2024-2025) with Guns & Rain at Oxford Rhodes House, along with an MFA solo exhibition, Browning the Archive (2024) at Michaelis Galleries, and All Directions (2025) at Fenix Museum.

1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, London Somerset House 17-19 October 2025 VIP Preview: 16 October Booth S7, Upstairs, South Wing It's a London fair debut for Zenaéca Singh @zenaeca who explores the history and legacy of South Africa’s colonial sugar economy, which was built on indentured labour from India. She uses sugar itself - molasses, sugar, and sugar paste, in varying states of crystallisation - as a symbolic reference to both an economic system built on exploitation, and the sweet, domestic, gendered associations of sugar within family life. Working across painting, sculpture, and installation, Singh delves into archival materials that explore the lives of indentured South African Indians, 1860 - 1911. In turn, family photographs serve as a powerful site of self-reclamation and source of alternate knowledge production versus that of the state. Singh transforms these personal momentos into visual narratives that draw on themes of history, identity, memory and place. The family photo emerges in this context as a defiant act of home-making and self-making. Alongside her molasses paintings, Singh’s sculptures of melting sugar ships recall the fluid connection between India and South Africa across the Indian Ocean, a relationship fortified by Britain’s colonisation of both countries in the late 19th century. Singh holds an MFA from the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art. Her commissioned work sits in the new Fenix museum of migration in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Singh has exhibited in multiple exhibitions in South Africa, including at the Slave Lodge, Cape Town; the Investec Cape Town Art Fair; Guns & Rain, Johannesburg; and Rhodes House, Oxford. #zenaecasingh #154artfair #gunsandrain #sugar #bittersweet #historiesofsugar #familiyphotos #labour @154artfair @somersethouse @rhodestrust @fenix

It’s the last month to view Entangled @rhodestrust in Oxford. Exhibition curated by Julie Taylor @gunsandrain Incredibly grateful to Maitha Alsuwaidi @maithriarch and Lucy Mercer for their dedication to excellent programming of this show over the past year and a half. Artwork: Making everyday sweeter (2024) installation composed of sugar-coated tea cups, sugar-paste doilies and molasses stained paintings on cotton in found vintage frames. Installation of sugar ships “The Beginning” (2023) “Five Generations” (2023) “Three ships” (2023) Featuring @tuliphoenix @nicola_brandt @raymond_fuyana @isheanesu.3 @giftaqua & Muningandu Hoveka Visit @rhodestrust profile for details about viewing.

Artist @zenaeca explored the afterlives of descendant Indian communities in South Africa and their continued quest for belonging through a series of landscape paintings. “Through landscape painting, I confront my own sense of home with how it has been shaped by the resilience of my ancestors.  This work asserts agency in a context where indigenous and marginalised communities have been historically dispossessed by colonial and apartheid regimes. The garden becomes a metaphor for becoming and belonging - each seedling planted into South African soil marking an act of rooting ourselves, both literally and symbolically. I play on the dual meanings of “route” (of indenture) and “root” (of plants) to frame this idea. ‘My Mother’s Garden’ (featured here), a sugar-coated oil painting of my home garden. The composition depicts a typical boutique garden with a row of shrubs and colourful flowers. The garden-space here subverts colonial landscaping practices in its recognition of the garden as a labour of leisure and pleasure for the marginal subject.  I recognise the garden space as vital for my mother, who experienced multiple spatial shifts, having to move homes many times to suit her family’s means of making a living during apartheid. The years of work invested into this garden honour the space of my mother’s desires and pleasure.” - Zenaéca Singh Join @heat_arts_festival curator Voni Baloyi for a conversation with Zenaéca Singh today at 17:00. This walkabout is part of the HEAT Festival programming. For more details and to book, visit the HEAT festival website. My Mother’s Garden | 2024 | Sugar and oil paint on canvas | 80 x 130 cm This work forms part of a group exhibition PROXIMATE WORLDS presented across two venues: Habitus 61 Loop Street & HEAT Festival Hub Alliance Français 155 Loop Street #zenaecasingh #heatwinterartsfestival #_untitledart

These two new works will be showing @avagallery.za in “tell me about a day you don’t remember” curated by the dream team Vida Madighi-Oghu, Aaliya Dramat, Erin Sweeney, and Aiden Nel. On view from 26th June until 31st July. 🤎 “No one ever told me you could mourn someone who never took up space on earth. […]. I, too, have been visited by the untamed thought: ‘you have been dead long enough, it’s time to come back’. But I have never heard the public chorus name the well of sorrow that you sink, when you begin to want to create someone who will not come.” - excerpt from Negative Space (2024) by Shari Daya. These works capture small moments from my maternal grandparents home on the farm my grandpa inherited. I want to honour my grandparents labour and love to make a home. These works have been created through stains of some of the earliest photographed moments on the farm. 🤎 1. Family picnic. 2025. Molasses on cotton with sugar-paste embroidery. 46 x 46 cm. 2. Making a home. 2025. Molasses on cotton with sugar-paste embroidery. 46 x 46 cm. @gunsandrain

So thrilled to have some works up @lemkusgallery with the wonderful @voni.baloyi curated show At Their Feet 🤎✨ Voni interprets Nadia David’s (2006) play At Their Feet as a basis to think about art-making as an act of care and mothering. With this in mind, artists were carefully paired together and encouraged to collaborate and to respond to each other’s practices. I got to work with @evenmynamewastaken who I share similar threads with in our practices as we both engage with notions and experiences of home, belonging and becoming. In making ‘A Radicle’, it felt like we were having a heartfelt conversation. I’m so grateful to work with these two brilliant minds! 😌📝 as well as showing with so many talented artists. Show will be up till August! Installation views by the wonderful @nicole_clare_fraser @gunsandrain for more details 🤎

Supporting emerging artists is at the core of what we do, so we are really proud to announce Zenaéca Singh's @zenaeca commission for @Fenix , the new museum about migration in Rotterdam. Fenix was opened last week by Queen Máxima on Thursday 15 May. Zenaéca's commissioned artwork '25 Days' reflects on the 19th-century migration of Indians to work on South Africa's sugar plantations, and forms part of the museum's permanent exhibition, 'All Directions'. Made from sugar, Zenaéca's sculpture features an arrangement of 25 ship models of the 'SS Courland'. In December 1896, the ship was carrying Mahatma Gandhi along with 350 Indian indentured passengers. The ship was held in a 25-day long quarantine in South Africa due to fears of Bombay's plague epidemic, further extended by European settler resistance to the arrival of Indians in the Natal colony. Upon their delayed disembarkation the passengers had stones thrown at them. '25 days' joins the permanent collection of the Fenix museum and is Singh's first museum commission and exhibition. Congratulations Zenaeca! And thanks also to @contemporary_art_stories for sharing pics from the opening. #EmergingArtists #Commission #MigrationMuseum #CulturalHeritage #ContemporaryArt #migration #fenixmuseum. #zenaecasingh #sculpture #sugar #sugarsculpture #africancontemporaryart #indianindentureship #indentureship

Legacies 2025 Molasses on cotton 90 x 60cm Working with molasses stains of archival images of indentured workers and families. Showing tomorrow @___undertheaegis 🤎🤎 curated by @tumimanne