VENUE: Women’s Jail Exhibition Wings
Date: 12 February – 12 April 2026 | Time: 18h00 – 21h00
SETLAMORAGO MASHILO: Modiši wa go botega
A solo exhibition on stewardship, land, memory, and the fragile architecture of belonging
Join us at Constitution Hill for the opening of Modiši wa go botega and experience a body of work that brings stewardship, land, memory, and belonging into powerful conversation.
Modiši wa go botega marks a significant new chapter in the practice of Setlamorago Mashilo, whose work has long interrogated land, movement, memory, and the fragile architecture of belonging. Presented within a former prison rather than a conventional gallery, the exhibition allows space, history, and material to speak in unison.
The title, Modiši wa go botega, is a Sepedi phrase describing a reliable shepherd or good steward. Rooted in Mashilo’s upbringing in rural Limpopo, the exhibition introduces a new body of work shaped by personal memory and broader socio-historical realities, particularly the legacies of dispossession, migration, and the erosion of ethical leadership. Here, the shepherd becomes both a literal figure and a symbolic one — a way of thinking through care, responsibility, and what happens when those forms of stewardship are lost or silenced within communities.
Bringing together bronze sculpture, painting, and collage, the exhibition continues Mashilo’s materially rich exploration of land, labour, and lived experience. Figurative bronze works sit alongside layered painted surfaces and collaged compositions, each carrying traces of memory, fragmentation, continuity, and emotional weight. Rather than offering easy conclusions, the works build a tactile and quietly confrontational narrative that asks how histories are held, inherited, and reassembled over time.
This materially driven approach builds on a career that has seen Mashilo exhibit widely in South Africa and internationally, including in London and across Europe. Earlier works examined home, interiority, and contested land as sites of psychological and political tension. Modiši wa go botega deepens these concerns by bringing questions of leadership, loss, continuity, and belonging into sharper focus.
The choice of Constitution Hill is central to the exhibition’s urgency. Once a place of confinement and now a symbol of constitutional rights and freedom of expression, the Women’s Jail offers a setting where the work can be tested against histories that still live in the walls. In this context, the exhibition becomes more than a display of objects — it becomes part of an ongoing dialogue about ethics, memory, leadership, and the responsibility of care in a fractured world.
The exhibition is made possible through a collaboration between Setlamorago Mashilo Studio, BrownEyedBoy Art, and Mohau Capital. Together, the partnership reflects a wider commitment to supporting artistic practice, strengthening patronage networks, and building sustainable platforms for the creative economy in Africa.
