Thebe Phetogo

Thebe Phetogo (b. 1993, Serowe, Botswana) is an artist working across painting, sculpture, and installation, based in Gaborone, Botswana. He holds a BA in Media Studies from the University of Botswana and a Postgraduate Diploma and MFA in Fine Art from the University of Cape Town's Michaelis School of Fine Art. His practice is rooted in his positionality as a Motswana artist working from a place of dislocation, using art to locate and build a space for himself in history as a subject and participant of the contemporary moment.

Central to Phetogo's practice is the blackbody series, whose title is drawn from the eponymous concept in physics: a blackbody is an idealized, hypothetical body that perfectly absorbs and radiates all electromagnetic energy, reflecting nothing. Transposed into painting, this becomes a framework for exploring the construction of race, visibility, and the Black body in both history and representation. His canvases employ the acid green of a film soundstage or the checkerboard of a transparent digital image as a null backdrop — a painterly manifestation of a digital void — against which disembodied figures from post-colonial African history appear on the brink of dissolution. The figures are rendered in modeled shades of green and articulated with shoe polish, a material whose use carries its own historical weight through the cross-cultural history of blackface in American minstrelsy and the African Concert Party tradition. The green screen thus functions simultaneously as a space for erasure and a space for becoming.

Phetogo draws on Setswana geography, mythology, and indigenous knowledge systems. His work moves between the political and the mystic, assembling figures from Tswana history and folklore — Mmanthatisi rendered as a female deity, the folk figure Mmamashia transformed into a contemporary revolutionary, activist Roy Sesana adorned in the leopard pelts that are the conventional marker of conservative government in Botswana — in a mode of postcolonial historical genre painting where myth and reality habitually cross-pollinate.

Phetogo has exhibited in Nigeria, South Africa, and Botswana, with solo presentations including blackbody Composites at kó in Lagos (2020), blackbody Rogues' Gallery at von ammon co in Washington DC (2021), and 7 Propositions for the Origin of a blackbody at kó in Lagos (2023). He is represented by von ammon co in Washington DC and Eclectica Contemporary in Cape Town.