South Africa is in a moment of self-realization reflecting and embracing its cultural diversities, whilst rewriting its stories through the lenses of young people who are curious, like myself.” I communicate my views from where I am standing as a black youth in South African society and the world at large. The artist states: “I understand my artistic practice as a space between my inner soul, my dreams and my identity. WonderBuhle received his first formal training through the BAT Centre Artists in Residency (AIR) Program and went on to study fine art through the Velobala apprenticeship program at Durban University of Technology, under the mentorship of Themba Shibase. He says that his mother encouraged him to explore art as a career as he used to play with charcoal from the fire and draw stick figures on the walls of the house as a child. He started making art as a hobby at the age of nine. WonderBuhle, born 1989 in South Africa, is a Durban-based visual artist from Kwa-Ngcolosi, a village that is still ruled by a chief. The good thing about performing on canvas is that anything is possible – and that is what intrigues Erheriene-Essi the most.Į GO TO THE ARTIST PAGE The audience is continuously invited to watch as well as to try and decipher the haphazard plot in which characters are encased in. Yet they have ‘sound’ as if they are performing and want to be heard. The paintings ‘play’ in their own way – they are telling a story, even though the scenes have no beginning, middle or end – they are cut off mid flow, out of context, are frozen, silent and still.

These ‘theatrical scenes’ show the imagined as well as the underrepresented, not only to the viewer but also to the artist herself. The canvases she makes are a theatre of popular desires and fantasies, where we all can discover and play with the process of identification. In her work, Erheriene-Essi makes many references to popular culture, because popular culture is profoundly mythic and loaded. In the process she perhaps slightly changes our readings of history and thereby shows how we write the present. Or rather, she is incessantly attempting to imagine more humane and liberating narratives than what has gone before. Erheriene-Essi continuously re-edits the narratives with the hope of robbing history of some of its tyrannical power by creating new scenarios. With hindsight, bias and curiosity, she takes these discordances and brings them up to the surface. A large part of her practice entails collecting and creating an archive, which could potentially become incorporated into her work. Archives are important to the artist as they create links and orders that she can question and play with – she searches for the discrepancies, the silences, in order to, through painting, create interruptions and assaults on the canonical historical narrative. She is captivated by history – in particular, images, objects, and documents which we can return to, in order to examine both individual and shared memories and histories. Lives and works in Amsterdam, The NetherlandsĮsiri Erheriene-Essi is predominately a painter of mid to large-scale paintings concerned with figuration, history and society.

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