Sechaba Nyenye
Sechaba Nyenye was born in Ficksburg (1982) raised in Lesotho and based in Cape Town. He met Ndzube in mid-2022, and assisted in the fabrication of the sculptural elements of Masemola Road. Nyenye’s key interests are fashion and music, he is a rapper and clothes designer. For the last 4 years, he has been working on an album with his band ‘Nobody for President’. He wanted to create a costume for each band member, but from lacking the means to buy materials needed he would seek and collect remnants left by other
beaders in Rondebosch. Instead of using these completed masks as costumery for his band, he gave them a life as artworks. Nyenye found that creating these masks gave him a sense of peace and the meticulousness of the work actively developed his sense of patience.
Nyenye uses beads for their cultural significance across southern Africa and what they represent for him - pride, power and identity. He is interested in the fact that beads were used historically as currency, and continue to have value in trade as jewellery, ornamentation and works of art.
Across Nyenye’s paintings, a recurring figure is that of a village man who comes to the city to pursue his dream of being an artist. Though depicted in surreal, spectral environments he states this figure is based off his own life and the story of his uncle that he had never met but had made music and busked around the mines of Johannesburg, never to return to the village that he left.
Badimo, Nyenye’s photographic series, looks at destigmatizing people with Albinism in Lesotho. The series originates from the artist’s friendship with Boitumelo Angel Maphasa, a woman with albinism. In their growing acquaintance she described being known only on the basis of her pigment - her personality, skills and potential largely being ignored. Badimo, created as a collaboration, provided Nyenye and Maphasa the means to rewrite the narrative around albinism. While creating the work, Nyenye describes encountering
Basotho herdsmen, and over the course of conversation, an affinity emerged, inspiring the men to join the shoot and further complicate the concepts of national identity in Badimo. The title, translates as ‘Ancestors/God’, from the popular idiom, “bantu ba modimo”, and with this series Nyenye uses a bright amalgamation of colour and expression to question belief, belonging, tradition and personhood within the Lesotho landscape.