NONZUZO GXEKWA

Working within the aesthetic legacy of intimate Black portraiture, Gxekwa continues a conversation with South African photographic traditions while forging a space where the adorned body speaks beyond language.

“Refusal is not only the action of saying no, it is a complex set of practices that unsettle authoritative forms of knowing.” - Tina Campt

In Nonzuzo Gxekwa’s photographic practice, portraiture becomes a site of resistance and reconstitution. Whether her sitters are shrouded in yarn masks or captured in stark monochrome, each portrait reconfigures the politics of looking. These are not simply images to be consumed. They ask us to pause — to question the ease with which we access and read Black subjects.

Working within the lineage of intimate Black portraiture and the experimental edge of postcolonial image-making, Gxekwa complicates the desire for legibility. The monochrome images lean into subtlety, tonality, and atmosphere. These shift our attention to gesture, posture, and the unspoken, they are not quieter — they are just as loud in their refusal to comply. Fred Moten (2003) describes fugitivity as a way of living that slips the grasp of capture — not just physical or institutional, but epistemological. It resists full legibility. Fugitivity is not escape for escape’s sake, but a mode of life in blur, shimmer, and relation. Nonzuzo Gxekwa’s portraits dwell here. They do not reveal or explain. They invite the viewer not to decode, but to witness.

This is the ethical weight of the gaze: not to possess, but to hold; not to reduce, but to honour