Tshepiso Mazibuko, from Thokoza in Gauteng, was awarded the Madame Figaro Photo Award and the 2024 Discovery Louis Roederer Public Award at the prestigious Rencontres d’Arles photography festival for her exhibition Ho tshepa ntshepedi ya bontshepe (To Believe in Something That Will Never Happen).
The Rencontres d’Arles, recognised as one of Europe’s premier photography events, opened on 1 July and will be on view until 29 September 2024. Since its inception, the festival has been a significant platform for promoting photography and its contributors, including photographers, artists, curators, and publishers.
This year, Mazibuko, a recipient of the Tierney Fellowship in 2017 and the Prince Claus Fund grant for 2018, clinched her position as an artist to watch as she secured a double triumph by winning two major awards. The Madame Figaro Photo Award is dedicated to women photographers, honouring an outstanding artist featured in the festival’s programme, while the 2024 Discovery Louis Roederer Public Award is chosen by festival visitors and comes with a €5 000 (around R99 000) prize.
Ho tshepa ntshepedi ya bontshepe explores the impact of the political designation ‘born free’ on South Africa’s post-1994 Black youth generation. The title, derived from a Sesotho proverb, explores the paradoxical nature of this label and how the remnants of Apartheid have hindered the full realisation of freedom. Through self-portraits and community-focused imagery, Mazibuko examines her own experiences and societal constructs.
‘Through portraits of young people photographed in their daily lives in Thokoza, the photographer takes an inside look at her community,’ writes curator Audrey Illouz in a statement. ‘Adopting an introspective approach, she paints an intimate portrait where frustration and benevolence coexist, where violence is latent, where faces are often tense, sometimes strained, sometimes proud, occasionally absorbed but rarely light-hearted.
‘The artist evokes her own frustration with the notion of born free, the trauma and responsibility inherited by her generation, the pervasive sense of sadness in a vulnerable place. Children, teenagers and young adults are the principal characters in these images, in which cracks, snags and gashes abound. Tshepiso Mazibuko's images seem to be suspended in time, as in this truncated portrait where fingerprints spot the garment, where something stumbles but a form of resistance emerges.’
Mazibuko is an alum of the Of Soul and Joy project, a social and artistic mentoring programme in photography for youth from the township of Thokoza and surrounding areas of Johannesburg.
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