Future is now, 2023

Lindokuhle Khumalo  

Lindokuhle Khumalo is a South African contemporary artist born in 1995 in the small village of Ndwedwe, KwaZulu-Natal. He was raised by a single mother and after matriculating from Ubuhlebesizwe Secondary School he studied art at BAT Centre, Durban.

In 2015, he started to focus on his artistic career and in 2016 participated in a residency at Rorkes Drift Craft Centre where he studied textile printing under the mentorship of Swedish artist, Marlin Sellmen. He then attended the Velobala Development Program hosted by the African Art Centre at the Durban University of Technology. In 2017, Khumalo received private commissions to create murals for the eThekwini municipality. Lindokuhle Khumalo also had the opportunity to participate in the 'Ikhono LaseNatali' project by visual activist Sir Zanele Muholi.

Lindokuhle participated in various group exhibitions throughout the African continent. In 2019, he was invited by Galerie Carole Kvasnevksi to showcase his latest works at the AKAA art fair in Paris. Lindokuhle presented another solo show at the AKAA art fair during their online edition in 2020. Lindokuhle's works are now part of the National Art Bank collection in South Africa and many private collections in Europe.

Lindokuhle's art explores and brings awareness to socio-political topics and cultural issues within the African rural communities in particular. He invests his time in producing conceptual art and attempts to reinvent relatively surreal contemporary methods and aesthetics which are mostly drawn from his imagination.

This creative reconstruction is employed by exploiting a variety of materials and techniques to provide new meaning. His work is basically an artistic reflection of the multi-layered social experiences, and a personal quest, exploring the current cultural values and partly visiting his Zulu spirituality.

He mostly explores figures, more than other elements as an artist. This explorative process provides him with an immense amount of inspiration, with its abundance of ideas and a space to delve into unvisited themes. And doing so enables him to artistically reflect on the traumatic history of South Africa and engage in constructively effective debates, challenging the status quo.

Essentially, his influences as a cultural worker are in everything he sees, feels, and experiences in his everyday life. His younger sister became his muse, as she's always inspired him both as an artistic subject and as someone he shares contemporary social views.