Nandipha Mntambo uses her work to address ongoing debates around traditional gender roles, body politics and identity. She works in photography, sculpture, video and mixed media to explore the liminal boundaries between human and animal, femininity and masculinity, attraction and repulsion, life and death. Born in Mbabane, Eswatini (formerly known as Swaziland), Mntambo currently lives in Johannesburg, South Africa. She holds a Master’s in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town.
Mntambo is best known for her figurative cowhide sculptures which allude to the symbiotic relationship between humans and nature. In her work, she focuses on the human body and the organic nature of identity, using mainly natural materials and experimenting with sculptures, videos and photography. Nandipha Mntambo uses the skin of the cow as a materials a lot in her pieces, the skin of the cow is often also used as a covering for human bodies thus oscillating between living bodies and bodies that once contained living, breathing, masticating beings with four stomachs. She embraces this ambiguity and likes to play with the tension between the sightly and the unsightly by manipulating how her viewers negotiate the two aspects of the hide.
Mntambo uses her own body as the mould for these sculptures and does not intend to make an explicit statement regarding femininity. Rather, she uses these hides to explore the division between animals and humans, as well as the divide between attraction and repulsion. This tension animated Mntambo’s first series of functional sculpture, which debuted in ‘Transcending Instinct’ (2022), her first solo exhibition at Southern Guild. In this collaboration with the gallery, she explored how key ideas, materials and forms from her archive could be applied to the creation of seating objects that disrupt the border between function and dysfunction. The works invited the audience to literally occupy the space of her own body, recasting themselves in ways that both comforted and obstructed the self.
Other notable solo exhibitions include ‘Agoodjie’ at Everard Read in Johannesburg (2021) and Cape Town (2022); ‘The Snake You left Inside Me’ at Stevenson in Johannesburg (2017); ‘Metamorphoses’ at Stevenson in Cape Town (2014); ‘Nandipha Mntambo’ at Andréhn-Schiptjenko in Stockholm (2013) and ‘Faena’, a travelling exhibition showcased at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival, the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum in Port Elizabeth, and at Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town (2011).
Mntambo’s participation in group shows includes ‘In Brilliant Light’ at Museum Volkenkunde in the Netherlands (2024);’Ozange’ at the Contemporary Photography Biennale in Malaga Spain (2022); ‘Made Visible: Contemporary South African Fashion and Identity’ at Museum of Fine Arts Boston (2019); ‘City Deep’ at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg (2018); ‘Regarding Africa: Contemporary Art and Afro-Futurism’ at Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2017); as well as the 12th Edition of Dak’Art, the African Art Biennale in Senegal (2016) among others. Mntambo has been shortlisted for the AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize in Canada (2014), was a Civitella Ranieri Fellow (2013), received the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art (2011) and the Wits/BHP Billiton Fellowship (201
