Neo Theku (b.1996) was born in Botshabelo, the Free State, South Africa. He grew up in Lesotho and moved back to Bloemfontein, South Africa where he started high school in 2010. He then went on to complete an Advanced Diploma in Graphic Design at Central University of Technology, Bloemfontein in 2020.
With his work, Neo Theku reflects personal experiences linked to larger social and mental structures, these are often informed by his experience as a fatherless boy raised by an overprotective mother. Theku uses memory as a portal to reflect on past ignored emotional states, thereby exploring mental health among young black male adults. His photography, film and performance grapple with the system that societies use to upbring and still destroy the male figure in black communities.
Theku critically engages with the complex instrument of examining and even healing the toxic and brutal acts of violence aimed at making men in black communities, which therefore questions if society is able to make upstanding citizens out of men. He uses a personal diction of ritual and symbols in which his physical form becomes a signifier. He uses his own body as a significant shift away from the problematic depiction of the other and as a gesture of self-actualisation and acknowledgment of subjective experience, exploring the intricate web of societal pressures, family expectations and personal habits that shape these experiences.
Neo Theku has exhibited at Ark Contemporary (2022); MM Art House (2022); Gallery 2 (2021); Phatshoane Henney Attorneys (2020); and at Oliewenhuis Art Museum (2019). He was a Sasol New Signatures Art Competition finalist in 2024, 2023 and 2021. In 2022 he was an ABSA L’Atelier finalist and a Blessing Ngobeni Art Prize finalist. In 2021 he took part in the Art Bank of South Africa Commission Program.
As of June 2025, he has recently concluded a Graphic Designer internship at William Humphreys Art Gallery in Kimberley, Northern Cape, South Africa. His first solo exhibition titled ASYLUMISM opens on the 2nd of August and will run until the 22nd of September 2025 at The Viewing Room Art Gallery in Pretoria, South Africa. ASYLUMISM is made up of 18 photographs and two performance videos.
Much like the recurring theme in the artist’s work, this exhibition focuses on the brutal acts of violence that are often linked to men, such as suicide cases. Speaking to common sayings that men are dogs, or men should be strong as oxen, this exhibition speaks to the dehumanisation of men by portraying them as animals.
The title of the exhibition speaks to a system created by society to exhibit control and isolation, with that it can be said that black men live in a mental asylum where they are denied emotional development due to the expectation to restrict the degree to which they let out their emotions. With that said, the exhibition also seeks to inspire a form of resistance to these systems that prohibit a full human experience where black young men are concerned.
Theku currently lives and works from Bloemfontein, South Africa.
