Nandipha Mntambo

Nandipha Mntambo's work addresses ongoing debates around traditional gender roles, body politics, and identity. She works in photography, sculpture, video, and mixed media to explore the liminal boundaries between human and animal, femininity and masculinity, attraction and repulsion, life and death.

Born in Mbabane, Eswatini (formerly known as Swaziland), Mntambo currently lives in Johannesburg. In 2007, she completed a Master’s in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town.

Mntambo is best known for her figurative cowhide sculptures which allude to the symbiotic relationship between humans and nature. In her work, she focuses on the human body and the organic nature of identity, using mainly natural materials and experimenting with sculptures, videos and photography. One of her favourite materials to use in her pieces is the skin of the cow, often also used as a covering for human bodies – boneless sculptures – and thus oscillating between evoking the garments that can be shod at will and the bodies that once contained living, breathing, masticating beings with four stomachs. Mntambo embraces this ambiguity and likes to play with the tension between the sightly and the unsightly by manipulating how her viewers negotiate the two aspects of the hide.

She uses her own body as the mould for these sculptures and does not intend to make an explicit statement regarding femininity. Rather, Mntambo uses these hides to explore the division between animals and humans, as well as the divide between attraction and repulsion.

This tension animated Mntambo's first series of functional sculpture, which debuted in Transcending Instinct (2022), her first solo exhibition at Southern Guild. In this collaboration with the gallery, she explored how key ideas, materials and forms from her archive could be applied to the creation of seating objects that disrupt the border between function and dysfunction. The works invited the audience to literally occupy the space of her own body, recasting themselves in ways that both comforted and obstructed the self.

Other notable solo exhibitions include Agoodjie at Everard Read in Johannesburg (2021) and Cape Town (2022); The Snake You left Inside Me at Stevenson in Johannesburg (2017); Metamorphoses at Stevenson in Cape Town (2014); Nandipha Mntambo at Andréhn-Schiptjenko in Stockholm (2013) and Faena, a travelling exhibition showcased at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival, the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum in Port Elizabeth, and at Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town (2011).

Mntambo’s participation in group shows includes In Brilliant Light at Museum Volkenkunde in the Netherlands (2024);Ozange at the Contemporary Photography Biennale in Malaga, Spain (2022);Made Visible: Contemporary South African Fashion and Identity at Museum of Fine Arts Boston (2019); City Deep at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg (2018); Regarding Africa: Contemporary Art and Afro-Futurism at Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2017); the 12th Edition of Dak’Art, the African Art Biennale in Senegal (2016); Disguise: Masks and Global African Art at Seattle Art Museum (2015); What Remains is Tomorrow for the South African Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015); The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists at Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) in Frankfurt/Main, Germany (2014); and the 3rd Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (Moscow, Russia: 2012).

She has been shortlisted for the AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize in Canada (2014), was a Civitella Ranieri Fellow (2013), received the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art (2011) and the Wits/BHP Billiton Fellowship (2010).