Simphiwe Ndzube

Simphiwe Ndzube was born in 1990 in Hofmeyr, Eastern Cape, and lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and Cape Town, South Africa.

Ndzube’s work is characterised by a fundamental interplay between objects, media and two-dimensional surfaces; stitching together a subjective account of the Black experience in post-apartheid South Africa from a mythological perspective. His work is currently on view at OCMA, as part of the California Biennial 2022: Pacific Gold.

Through painting, sculpture, and spatial intervention, Simphiwe Ndzube stages an introduction to his imaginative universe: the Mine-moon. He states, "We begin in the real world, and through interaction with the work enter a fabulist tale in progress. I’ve attempted to create the genesis of a cosmology that finds itself in the uncharted lands and trackless seas. In it exists characters: gods, and demigods—different people influenced by the post-apartheid Black South African experience. It emerges from the tradition of magical realism and is expanding to points currently unknown."

Ndzube highlights Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community by Wendy B Faris and Lois Parkinson Zamora which describes magical realism as "a mode suited to exploring—and transgressing—boundaries, whether the boundaries are ontological, political, geographical or generic. [It] facilitates the fusion, or coexistence, of possible worlds, spaces, [and] systems that would be irreconcilable in other modes."