Senzeni Marasela

Senzeni Marasela was born in 1977 in Thokoza, on the East Rand of South Africa, and lives and works in Soweto and Johannesburg. She obtained her BA in Fine Arts at the Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, in 1998. Her practice — spanning embroidery, performance, photography, video, prints, and mixed-media installation — centers on questions of Black womanhood, mourning, trauma, and historical memory in South Africa. A central long-term project is her engagement with the figure of Theodorah, a persona whose story she has inhabited and performed, including through a six-year durational performance (2013–2019) in which she wore the same red isishweshwe dress every day, embodying the experience of waiting and loneliness that defines Theodorah's story.

Marasela's embroideries translate personal and political histories into a medium associated with domesticity and women's labor, using archival materials — newspapers, photographs — printed onto colonial textiles to build an intimate archive of Black women's lives in South Africa. Her performance and video work engages with the figures of Sara Baartman, Theodorah Mpofukazi Marasela (her mother), and other women whose stories have been silenced or distorted by official historical narratives. The material culture she employs — the red dress, doilies, Victorian lace passed down through her family — functions as a carrier of cultural memory.

Marasela was part of the South African Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 and received the K21 Global Art Award in 2023, with her work entering the collection of Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf. She has had solo exhibitions at Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town (Waiting for Gebane, 2020), and at the Johannesburg Art Gallery. Her work is held in the collections of MoMA New York, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, and the Newark Museum, among others. She is represented by Ebony/Curated in Cape Town.