Artist, educator, curator & researcher · Co-Director, Ponte d’Arte
Community collaboration · Intuthuko, Kris van ’t Hof & Celia de Villiers · Contextile 2020
Two large hand-embroidered panels — Madiba and Ubuntu — made by the Intuthuko Embroidery Collective to a design by Kris van ’t Hof, art-directed by Celia de Villiers, selected for the Contextile Biennale in Portugal.
Image to come(Missing info)Madiba and Ubuntu are two 180 × 180 cm panels designed by Prof. Kris van ’t Hof, with three Flemish exchange students from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp; art-directed over two years by Celia de Villiers, assisted by Hester Viles; and hand-embroidered by the Intuthuko Embroidery Collective — the women’s group de Villiers founded near Johannesburg.
The design of each panel is the QR code for its title — Madiba and ubuntu (‘I am because of who we all are’) — the scannable modular grid filled in with embroidered scenes of South African life. Made in commemoration of ten years of South African democracy (2004–2014), the panels were selected as one of 59 works from 870 applicants across 65 countries for the international section ‘Places of Memory’ at the Contextile Contemporary Textile Art Biennale, Guimarães, Portugal (2020). The detail shown is the work of Nomsa Sithole.