iQhiya is a network of young black women artists based in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa.
They specialise in a broad range of artistic disciplines including performance art, video, photography, sculpture and other mediums.
[2] The collective was originally formed by Asemahle Ntlonti, Bronwyn Katz, Buhlebezwe Siwani, Bonolo Kavula, Charity Kelapile, Lungiswa Gqunta, Pinky Mayeng, Sethembile Msezane, Sisipho Ngodwana, Thandiwe Msebenzi, and Thuli Gamedze.
She is a member of iQhiya a collective of 11 black women in based in Cape Town, Johannesburg, South Africa and Botswana.
Kavula creates a new art persona in the video piece titled, Messy, which is featured in the Zeitz MOCAA exhibition The Main Complaint.
Multi-disciplinary artist, Bronwyn Katz completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2015, receiving the Simon Gerson Prize for a distinctive body of work related to collective history and memory linked to the spaces and objects around them.
[4] She has since exhibited throughout the globe, participating in shows such as Dak'Art (2016) in Senegal; the Kunsthale Kade, Netherlands (2017- 2018), as well as the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2018).
[5] Buhlebezwe Kamohelo Siwani is a visual artist living and working in Cape Town with a focus on performance, photography, sculpture and installation.
As an initiated sangoma, Siwani has also used her artistic practice to delve into religious subjects and the often-perplexing relationship between Christianity and African spirituality.
She obtained her undergraduate degree at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in 2012 and her MFA at the Michaelis School of Fine Arts in Cape Town in 2017.
In addition to her independent practice, Gqunta is one of the founding members of iQhiya, with whom she recently participated in Documenta 14 and Glasgow International.
She is also part of iQhiya a collective of eleven black women artists based in South Africa and Botswana.
Using interdisciplinary practice encompassing performance, photography, film, sculpture and drawing, Msezane creates commanding works heavy with spiritual and political symbolism.
Part of her work has examined the processes of mythmaking which are used to construct history, calling attention to the absence of the black female body in both the narratives and physical spaces of historical commemoration.
Born in 1991, Thandiwe Msebenzi is a photographic artist who uses her images as a way to communicate her own experiences as a woman, and to connect this to larger conversations about how women are treated.
[8] Thulile Gamedze is a cultural worker, based in Cape Town, South Africa, situating her practice between writing, curating, teaching and art production.
They seek to contest and transform invisible institutional lines that consciously or unconsciously continue to marginalize black women voices in the art world.