In this conversation with The Art Momentum, Cape Town–based artist Manyaku Mashilo reflects on memory, listening, and the spiritual lineages that shape her practice. Created for the SOLO section of the Investec Cape Town Art Fair 2026, Here I Saw My Ancestors First explores painting as an act of remembrance: one that allows ancestral presence, ritual, and embodied memory to surface through repetition, gesture, and material process. Drawing on family photographs, sensory recollections, and the matriarchal knowledge systems passed down through her grandmothers, Mashilo discusses how images, objects, and sensations — from church uniforms and choir songs to archival photographs — become points of departure in her work, allowing figures to move through liminal spaces where the visible and unseen converge.
A sound piece created especially for the fair by the artist is available at the end of this interview.
Your work often depicts figures migrating through liminal, cosmological spaces, as if they’re resonating with ancestral memories, spiritual identities, and collective archives. How do you interpret the act of listening (to ancestors, hidden histories, and unspoken communities) in the making of your paintings, and how does this become visible in the “echoes of humanity” you depict?
Listening, for me, is a state of remembering. I make my work in remembrance of the place and the people I come from, and painting becomes a way of accessing memories that live within the body. I am not always certain what I am being called to make at the beginning, but through sound, repetition, and gesture, something begins to surface.
Music, ritual, and sensory memories guide the movement of my body across the canvas, and I begin to understand painting as a way of responding to ancestral presence rather than illustrating a fixed narrative.
Living far from home has made me more aware of how easily spiritual and cultural knowledge can be interrupted or erased, especially within an increasingly Eurocentric world. Listening becomes a way of resisting that erasure. It is how I remain in conversation with the spiritual systems, rituals, and ways of knowing that shaped me. It allows me to affirm that those experiences were real and continue to exist within me.
This listening becomes visible through repetition, gesture, and the movement of the figures themselves. They exist in liminal, undefined spaces because they carry memory across time. Many of them are informed by images that remind me of my grandmothers, and through painting them repeatedly, I begin to trace a path back to them. Their forward movement reflects persistence, faith, and the body’s refusal to forget.
The “echoes of humanity” emerge through these traces through the layering of marks, the dissolving and re-emerging of forms, and the sense of presence that cannot be fully explained. Painting becomes a way of honouring what came before me, and of keeping those memories, histories, and spiritual inheritances alive in the present.
The SOLO section’s theme speaks of “echoes” rather than mere repetition; resonances shaped by time, memory, and relation. In your practice, you draw on family photographs and archival imagery. Is there a specific moment or object that “echoed” for you and became a point of departure in your work?
Yes, there are specific images that stay with me in a way that feels like an echo rather than a reference. Often, it is a photograph that reminds me of my grandmothers, not always literally them, but something in the posture of the body, the way they stand, or the direction of their gaze. There is a particular “forward” gesture I return to often. It carries a quiet sense of faith, persistence, and spiritual grounding. When I encounter an image like this, it feels familiar, as if it holds a memory my body already knows.
I spend time sitting with these images. I print them at different scales, live with them in the studio, and paint them repeatedly. Through this repetition, the image begins to shift. It becomes less about the original photograph and more about what it carries: presence, longing, and continuity. Each iteration is slightly different, but they all feel connected, as though they are moving along the same path.
There are also sensory objects that echo in my work, such as the fabric of my mother’s church uniform or the sounds of choirs and brass bands during prayer. These experiences shaped my understanding of spirituality as something embodied and collective. Even now, those textures, sounds, and atmospheres resurface through colour, rhythm, and gesture.
These echoes become points of departure because they allow me to access something beyond the image itself. They open a space where memory, ancestry, and imagination meet. Through painting, I am not trying to reconstruct a specific moment, but to honour the presence that remains, the emotional and spiritual resonance that continues to live on.
In your recent work, you bring together the material (red ochre, ink, water, paint) and the immaterial (ancestral lineages, spiritual journeys, imagined futures). How do you balance the “listening between worlds” of the seen and the unseen, and how do you hope viewers might listen differently when engaging with your paintings than they might with a more conventional figurative portrait?
Balancing the material and the immaterial begins with trust in the physical process of painting. Materials like red ochre, ink, water, and poured paint carry their own histories and energies. Red ochre and pigments in particular connect me to the colour of the ground back home. This colour and texture allow memories of rites of passage, playing in the sand, and my mother’s systems of mark-making and spiritual practices. When I work with these materials and colours, I allow them to move freely across the surface.
The pouring, staining, and layering are guided as much by intuition as by intention. It is within this space of surrender that listening happens, where the physical act of painting becomes a way of accessing something beyond what is immediately visible.
For me, listening between worlds means accepting that memory, spirit, and presence do not always appear in fixed or defined forms. The figures often emerge gradually, sometimes dissolving back into the surface, because they are not meant to exist as singular, stable portraits. They are carriers of emotional and ancestral frequencies. The material becomes a bridge; it gives weight and form to something that is otherwise intangible.
I hope that viewers engage with my paintings not by trying to identify a specific person or narrative, but by allowing themselves to feel what is present. My work is inviting a slower and more intuitive form of looking. I hope viewers listen with their bodies as much as with their eyes. That they become aware of repetition, rhythm, and atmosphere, and recognise something of their own memory or emotional inheritance within the figures.
Sound Piece: Here I Saw My Ancestors First. Courtesy Manyaku Mashilo.
Manyaku Mashilo is represented by Southern Guild.