Nyakallo Maleke

Project

Nyakallo Maleke (b.1993, Soweto, South Africa) is an artist and writer currently practicing from Johannesburg. Nyakallo’s practice is grounded in an expanded concept of drawing, which she views as a means to tell stories about space, movement and walking. Her drawings take shape through various media, techniques, and disciplines, and are manifested in installations, performances, sound pieces, prints or sculptures. Her recent works are invested with materiality, often combining traditional drawing media with meticulous embroidery-like stitching and unconventional materials such as wax paper, protective plastic sheets and fabric.

The Things We Made For The Things That We Did Not Know / A Manuscript For Drawings And Other Obsessions That Can Be Shuffled is an idea based on producing a compilation of objects, sounds, photographs, and drawings. Nyakallo’s process begins with a set of personal and collective engagements that are hypothetical, and that would be articulated via alternative objects/merchandise and multiple disciplines.

The Things We Made For The Things That We Did Not Know is partly rooted in a process of thinking in reverse and tracing backwards and is centred around particular keywords that continue to influence a thinking pattern about drawing, space, materiality, “migration” and language; - ongoing elements that contribute to objects, words, belongings, and other obsessions that are carriers of knowledge. The project features collaborations with Matshelane Xhakaza, Caterina Giansiracusa and Crista Uwase.