Stevenson is pleased to present Thank you for bearing witness by Mahube Diseko, as part of its sixth iteration of STAGE, a platform for younger unrepresented artists. Speaking on love and its risks, bell hooks states, “The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside of our control.” hooks engaged in the topic of love from a philosophical standpoint – rigorously and emphatically considering its nature and influence over our lives.
Mahube Diseko, who describes herself as a ‘confessional artist’ uses her work to inhabit this place beyond safety, offering vulnerable admissions about the love in her life through sculpted underwear. In this series, each work is threaded with messages on the yearning, anxiety, vulnerability, joy and stillness wrapped around this practice of love. Diseko’s first experiment in this mode was a 2023 work that held the phrase, I miss myself the most.
This initial foray into text-based sculpture catalysed the artist into working between language and the modestly sized (yet suggestive) form of underwear which becomes her canvas. A self-proclaimed ‘lover-girl’, in this exhibition she makes love her muse. Describing the process of making art as akin to taking a lover, Diseko’s cotton surfaces bear phrases like ‘Sincerity is scary’ or ‘Try softer not harder’, that teeter from instruction to confession.
The artist tackles her reverence towards romance, projecting her individual feelings that may ring true for a broader collective. In Thank you for bearing witness, the artist invites us into her idea of love, and gives texture to it. The articles of underwear, both hard and soft, are contained in frames but also dotted along a fur wall installation that Diseko has used to further bring attention to the work’s delicacy, converging into a landscape of love musings that are both textually evocative and tactile.
With the decision to use thrifted underwear, the object’s history is subsumed and reworked into the artist’s own experiences. Although Diseko resists thinking of love through a naive or fanciful lens, she considers love to be an instrument we all have access to, and the underwear thus a metaphor for this access and intimacy. Earlier iterations of STAGE have featured Farhana Jacobs, Thato Toeba, Lebogang Mogul Mabusela, Mack Magagane and Khanyisile Mawhayi. Thank you for bearing witness opened on the 29th of March and will run until the 9th of May 2025 at STEVENSON Johannesburg.
