Join multidisciplinary artist Owanto as she reflects on the sensibilities shaping Traces of the Timeless, her SOLO presentation at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair 2026. The multimedia installation traced Owanto’s return to painting as both a personal and philosophical gesture — one that draws on her transcontinental life between Gabon, Europe, and the United States. Presented in dialogue with her Flowers series on view at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA), this new body of work turns inward, engaging memory, ancestry, and transformation through layered surfaces and oceanic palettes that invite a slower, more embodied encounter with time.
A sound piece created especially for the fair by the artist is available at the end of this interview.
Your artistic journey encompasses a rich tapestry of cultural influences, from your upbringing in Gabon to your studies in Europe. In your work, you often explore the complexities of identity and memory. How do you perceive the act of “listening” to these layered identities, and how does this listening manifest in your artistic practice?
For me, listening is not a metaphor, it is a state of being. I grew up in Gabon, along the coast of Libreville, within an animist worldview where ancestral knowledge, oral traditions, and memory are ever-present. I come from a lineage in which ways of seeing and knowing are transmitted beyond words, forms of perception that move beyond the visible.
Later, my studies and life in Europe, across Africa, the United States, and other lands introduced additional layers: distance and presence, displacement and encounter, absence and return. I experience identity as something fluid, always in a state of becoming, like the tides, the ebb and flow of the ocean. Listening, in this sense, means allowing these layers to coexist without hierarchy. It is an attentive openness to what is inherited, what is learned, and what is unconsciously remembered. In my practice, this listening manifests through gesture and repetition, raw brushstrokes, signs, and totemic forms that act as traces rather than representations. I do not try to resolve identity; I allow it to resonate. The work becomes a space where multiple temporalities and identities speak to one another through echo rather than declaration.
The SOLO section’s theme, “Echoes of Humanity,” invites artists to delve into the resonances of human experiences. Given your exploration of themes such as women’s liberation, resilience, and transformation, how do you interpret these “echoes” in your work, and what do you hope they convey to the audience?
The echoes I work with are often subtle, sometimes fragile, yet deeply persistent. Themes such as women’s liberation, resilience, and transformation appear in my work not as slogans, but as lived frequencies, forces that move through bodies, histories, and generations.
These echoes take form as signs, silhouettes, vertical presences, or colours and words reduced to their essential vibration. They are gestures, marks made and repeated, traces of something once spoken that continues to return. In that sense, my paintings are echoes. They are gestures once made that continue to resonate over time. What I hope they convey to the audience is a sense of shared humanity beyond language or geography — a reminder that strength can be quiet, that memory endures through care, and that transformation often unfolds in the minor keys, through listening rather than confrontation.
Your multidisciplinary approach incorporates various materials and media. How do you engage with materials as a form of listening? Do the materials themselves “speak” to you, and if so, how do you interpret and respond to these “voices” in your creative process?
I approach materials as active presences, each carrying its own history and intelligence. When I work with pigments, wood, canvas, collages, photographs, metal, neon, or found objects, I approach them as collaborators rather than tools. This, too, is a form of listening.
Yes, materials speak: through resistance, fragility, weight, texture, and light. Each pigment, each mark, carries its own memory and resistance. They guide my gestures, my choices of scale, and sometimes even the direction of the work itself. The process becomes a dialogue in which control is shared. In this way, making is also an act of respect. Listening to materials allows the work to emerge organically, guided not only by intention but by what seeks to be revealed. This is where the spiritual dimension of my practice resides: in trusting that meaning arises when we listen deeply, to matter as much as to memory.
Owanto is represented by Reiners Contemporary Art.
Owanto: Traces of the Timeless (2026). Courtesy of the artist.