Andile Dyalvane will present new ceramic seating and a series of clay tablets at the Tel Aviv Biennale of Crafts & Design 2023, which opens on 30 March and runs until November.

The Tel Aviv Biennale of Crafts & Design began in 2020 with a large-scale exhibition throughout MUZA’s (Eretz Israel Museum) galleries, permanent collections and outdoor sites, featuring contemporary Israeli craft and design. In addition to the exhibition, the biennale will feature site-specific projects in various locales across the city.

MUZA is a municipal museum supported by the city of Tel Aviv that focuses on local material culture, past and present. The museum’s collections span more than 3,000 years, from the Biblical period to today. These feature many of the crafts that made life possible over the millennia. It is committed to displaying “the cultural heritage of all the people of this country, past and present”.

For the second biennale in 2023, the event has been extended to include 20-30 international artists whose work responds to ancient cultures and traditions, such as Bubu Ogisi (Nigeria), Gunybi Ganambarr (Australia), Rita Soto (Chile) and Seonjoo Lee (South Korea). The international component – curated by Kevin Murray, editor of Garland magazine – acknowledges a “mutual respect drawn from a realisation that no culture is complete to itself, and that intercultural encounters are necessary to help us learn of important perspectives beyond our own,” according to the organisers.

Made especially for the biennale, Dyalvane’s new clay works transmit uyalezo(messages) from his Xhosa ancestors and embody traditional concepts with supernatural, cosmological, and ecological potency. The deepen his exploration of symbology and prominently feature the simplified system of pictograms he has created since 2016.