Curated by Anelisa Mangcu, Billie Zangewa’s Breeding Ground does not present a resolution or the illusion of a fully drawn map. Instead, the artist’s first institutional exhibition in South Africa gathers the fragments of time, memory, and labour; offering them as they are, unfinished, ongoing. This is not a backward glance nor is it a return. It is not a triumphant arrival at the end of a long journey, nor is it an act of nostalgia. It is an excavation. A peeling back to see what remains, what has shifted, and what still refuses to settle.
Billie Zangewa stitches together quiet intimacies, rendering the everyday in raw silk. Her compositions do not clamor for attention through grand gestures or overt political declarations. Instead, they dwell in the delicate weight of the mundane, domestic rituals, fleeting moments, the quiet labor of living. Often depicting herself in these narratives, Zangewa transforms into both witness and heroine, charting the contours of her existence with measured grace. The materiality of her work, soft-edged and layered, mirrors its thematic depth, revealing the tender and textured fringes refusing singular definition.
But what does it mean for this work to finally be placed within an institution at home? What does a retrospective do, and for whom?
Zangewa works with silk. Not as decoration, not as a metaphor for softness, but as a surface that bears weight. Silk is both fragile and strong, delicate yet resilient. Its fibers hold history—its extraction tied to trade routes, empire, and capital. It is a material that resists easy meaning, just as her work refuses the burden of singular interpretation.
Domestic interiors. The body at rest. A woman by a window. A child held in the crook of an arm. These are not just images; they are evidence of the act of living.
Zangewa’s work does not announce itself loudly. It does not plead for recognition. Yet, it unsettles. In a world that demands Black life be rendered through the lens of crisis or spectacle, she insists on the mundane as a site of power. The simple act of being—uninterrupted, unfiltered, unposed—is its own quiet defiance.
Toni Morrison once said, “I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great deal more about contemporary life.” The retrospective, in its best form, is an act of understanding. It is a reckoning, a space where past and present collapse into each other.
Zangewa does not depict history in the way we are used to seeing it. There are no dates, no direct references to political moments, no grand declarations. And yet, history is everywhere in her work. In the way her figures move through space. In the inherited intimacies of care. In the unspoken weight of being seen, being held, being here.
There is something uneasy about institutional retrospectives—particularly for artists who have long worked outside their home country’s gaze. They often mark a moment of recognition, but recognition by whom? And at what cost?
Zangewa has exhibited across the world—her work circulating through major museums and collections. And yet, it has taken decades for this institutional show to happen in South Africa. This is not unique to her. It is a pattern, a familiar arc. Black artists, particularly Black women, are often first seen elsewhere before they are seen at home. Institutions, slow to move, wait for outside validation before acknowledging the work that has always been there.
But Zangewa has never worked for permission. Breeding Ground does not function as an introduction; it is a reminder. A reminder that the work has been happening. That it would have continued regardless.
A retrospective suggests a looking back. But Zangewa’s work resists the static. It moves. It breathes. It refuses to be archived as something past, something completed.
Care, labour, motherhood—these are not themes that begin and end. They loop, fray, double back. Zangewa stitches life as it is: unfinished, unresolved. The retrospective does not confirm a legacy; it reveals a process.
And so, Breeding Ground is not a place of finality. It is not a museum room to be walked through and exited. It is a site of making and unmaking. A space where history and contemporary life blur, where the act of looking is not about closure but about opening—about seeing what continues, what remains, what is still to come.