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Review on Intsomi in Metropolis M, by Karmen Samson, May 2025
22.05.2025 - 06.07.2025
Opening Thursday May 22nd from 5 - 8 pm
Location: NMAG, Bos en Lommerweg 88 and NMAG KIOSK, Willem de Zwijgerlaan 327 Amsterdam.
No Man’s Art Gallery is honoured to present Intsomi, the third solo exhibition by Buhlebezwe Siwani with the gallery. Siwani’s multidisciplinary practice ‒ spanning performance, photography, video and installation ‒ interrogates the patriarchal framing of the Black female body and experience within and beyond the South African context. As a Sangoma, she centres her work on ritual and the relationship between Christianity and African spirituality.
In a present shaped by a rightward political shift that increasingly demonstrates resistance to historical reckoning and cultural inclusion, Intsomi offers an alternative narrative to divisive political rhetoric around race and migration. Buhlebezwe Siwani invites us to confront history not as a past, but as a living force carried in the body, land, and spiritual realm.
In Xhosa, 'intsomi' means ‘tale,’ ‘legend,’ and ‘myth’ in story form, a word that resonates with the layered, inherited narratives Siwani seeks to reclaim. The eponymous sculptural flags Instomi (2025), hung throughout the exhibition, act as visual markers. Once red, white, and blue, they have been dredged and soaked in raw materials and spices. Here, past and present converge in acts of memory, resistance, and transformation.
The intersection of memory and myth materialises in the work Rhaxa Rhaxa (2025). Three hand carved stones, traditionally used in rural African communities for food preparation, become living archives for the artist; vessels of continuity ‒ objects that echo ancestral presence. Rhaxa Rhaxa is also an onomatopoeia: a word evoking the sound of something dragged along ‒ a weight, a lineage, a history that insists on being carried.
In Sara (2025) and Sojourner (2025), Siwani imagines Sojourner Truth, the African American abolitionist and women’s rights activist ‒ not as subject of spectacle or distant memory, but as a woman returning home. In Izithunzi (2025), Siwani places her own body within the historical architecture of the Oost-Indisch Huis / Bushuis, former headquarters of the VOC, surrounded by colonial artefacts. Dressed in traditional Xhosa attire adorned with cowrie shells and beads, her presence physically interrupts the colonial narrative, staging a quiet resistance within a space marked by exploitation.
Just as Rhaxa Rhaxa carries the traces of remains, the paintings and photographs animate what has been displaced, asking what it means to reclaim both space and (hi)story. A similar gesture extends into the earlier work Amagugu (2022), shown in the gallery’s mezzanine. In this video installation, Siwani appropriates Renaissance chiaroscuro to reimagine the Black body within a Western visual language. With a powerful gaze, Siwani’s subjects assert their presence in the canon.
Moving between the spiritual and the political, the intimate and the historical, Buhlebezwe Siwani creates a language of return ‒ one that refuses erasure and insists on presence. Intsomi ultimately gestures toward healing; not through forgetting but through the act of reimagining.
The opening of the exhibition will take place during Amsterdam Art Week, on Thursday May 22nd at 5PM, across both No Man’s Art Gallery (Bos en Lommerweg 88-90) and NMAG KIOSK (Willem de Zwijgerlaan 327). For more information, visit nomansart.com or email info@nomansart.com
Instomi, solo exhibition by Buhlebezwe Siwani at No Man’s Art Gallery, Amsterdam, NL, 2025. Photo by Jonathan de Waart