Zenaéca Singh

Zenaéca Singh was born in Port Shepstone, on the south coast of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, and lives and works in Cape Town. A fourth-generation South African Indian, she attended the National School of Arts in Johannesburg before completing a BA in Fine Art and an MFA, both with distinction, at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. Working across painting, sculpture, and installation, her practice centers on the history of Indian indentureship in South Africa — the over 150,000 Indians recruited to labor in the sugar plantations of the British Colony of Natal between 1860 and 1911 — and on the largely silenced experiences of indentured workers and their descendants, with particular attention to the voices of Indian women obscured by colonial and patriarchal archives.

Singh’s signature medium is sugar, deployed in its varying properties of transparency, opacity, solidity, and fluidity as an analogue for the archive itself: adhesive and unstable, rooted in the past and unresolved in the present. Her paintings translate family photographs onto hand-made sugar paste, worked in molasses and preserved in resin — an act of intimate counter-archiving against state-produced colonial documentation, which she critiques for deploying the “model minority” trope to obscure the structural violence of indenture. Sculptures of melting sugar ships evoke the Indian Ocean crossing and the entanglement of British colonialism across both India and South Africa, while domestic objects and scenarios situate her work within the gendered dynamics of the home, a space whose histories for South African Indian women she retrieves from beneath colonial over-determination. Her theoretical grounding draws on postcolonial and decolonial writing on memory, trauma, diaspora, and cultural history.

Singh has exhibited at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair with Guns & Rain, at the Slavery Remembrance Gallery at Leeuwenhof in Cape Town, and at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape. In 2024, she participated in Entangled: Southern African Artists Reflect on Colonialism, Monuments, & Memory at Rhodes House, Oxford. In 2025, she was commissioned to create the sugar-ship sculpture 25 Days for the permanent collection of the Fenix Museum of Migration in Rotterdam, as part of the inaugural exhibition All Directions. She was a UCT Accelerated Transformation of the Academic Programme (ATAP) Fellow. Recent projects include A Kind of Paradise: Colonial Era Photography in Contemporary Art at Museum Rietberg in Zurich (April 2026) and a Sharjah Art Foundation Residency (2026). She is represented by Guns & Rain in Johannesburg.