Through a compelling interplay of memory, materiality, and imagination, South African artist Cow Mash’s practice is deeply rooted in her exploration of identity, heritage, and transformation. For her presentation with Berman Contemporary in the SOLO section at the 2025 Investec Cape Town Art Fair, her work engages with the theme Playscapes: Shaping Worlds and Selves through a nuanced lens of play and nostalgia.
Drawing from personal and ancestral narratives, Mash employs the colour black as a conduit for storytelling, invoking both cultural memory and spiritual continuity. Her installation Plastic Kraal reimagines childhood play objects to interrogate land ownership, indigenous knowledge, and historical erasure, foregrounding her grandmother’s legacy within a broader discourse on displacement and reclamation. Through immersive elements such as tufted tapestries, coded linguistic textures, and performative acts of cultural transmission, Mash transforms play into a radical act of remembrance and resistance, bridging the past and present while questioning the futures we shape.
The colour black features prominently in your work, serving as both a visual anchor and a symbolic element. How does your playful approach to composition and material transform your chosen colour pallete into a medium for storytelling and cultural reflection?
With this current body of work, I draw from the saying, “Seeds grow in the dark.” Before my maternal grandmother passed away, I learned the praises of my name, Mothepa, which I inherited from her. She explained that the first part of the name speaks about the Mothepa before her (my great-great-grandmother) who planted black melons. This was a magical discovery, considering that when I learned this, I was already working exclusively in black.
I have since felt that my work is communicating to me and connected to a spiritual place. Learning about Mothepa, my matrilineal lineage, and womanhood has inspired my current body of work. I imagine the world where my inheritance of their ecological wisdom is still being passed down from generations. Having grown up away from my grandparents, I did not have the kind of access we would have to them if we lived in community settings that guaranteed a transfer of knowledge. So, all I can do is imagine it.
I use imaginative play and the colour black to create a world that nurtures Indigenous knowledge and wisdoms of women generations before me. Black in this work is a reflection of magic in connection to spirituality, of Blackness culturally, and of information growing in the dark and in isolation like a seed would underground; buried in soil, nurtured to grow.
The three-piece immersive installation, Plastic Kraal, which you will present at SOLO, evokes memories and emotions tied to childhood. In what ways have you integrated play and nostalgia into your creative process, and how do you view these elements in terms of personal and collective transformation?
There are elements in the work like the tufted tapestry, which reminds me of the play-carpets we often find for children at toy stores. These carpets are usually printed with roads and cities, on which children can use toy cars to drive around with their hands. I have created an aerial view of farmland and created miniature cows to replace the toy cars and reimagine this play carpet. Naming this part of the installation “♫ and on her farm, she has some Cows A-E-I-O-U (African vowels),” I wanted to play on the infamous nursery rhyme that teaches us of only a white old man owning a farm, and reimagine this in ownership of my grandmother, a Black woman owning a farm.
In addition, I make use of a childhood game we call ‘maskitlana’. This is a game where we as children would knock on paper with a pen and tell elaborate stories filled with drama. I enjoy how the remains of this game are paper that is torn from the continuous knocking and that these remnants become a coded language that cannot be translated. I’ve used this to create letters for a plant library. The language of the letters is in the form of this game, making them coded textures that communicate unknown information.
For the performance piece, I will be pushing a trolley that is inspired by the nostalgia of seeing street vendors in the township where my grandmother lived. These trolleys are usually filled with fresh produce. I replace the fresh produce with cultural artifacts, making me a vendor for indigenous knowledge. I will be speaking in my home language of Sepedi, which I honestly do not know as well as I wish I did. Making the performance a learning tool for myself, I also search for the words in Sepedi to communicate and force myself to further learn my home language.
All these elements of Plastic Kraal speak to a childhood and upbringing that is saturated with information and ways of living. By design, many people drift away from their cultural and indigenous ways of life. I must add that this is informed by being a new mother and wondering what cultural handover I have to offer my offspring, considering how and where I was raised and how much access I have/had to people with the knowledge of my relevant histories.
By rooting your practice in South Africa’s agricultural past, you evoke a sense of place and history. What strategies do you employ to ensure these themes transcend cultural boundaries and connect with viewers worldwide?
The first strategy would be through the use of objects like the planters, the greenhouse, and canned food tins, which are used to grow these “plants” that I’ve made. I think this is a global problem of urbanisation, where we do not have access to land, and more and more people are warned about the food industries’ use of GMOs, chemical growth, etc. Planters and smaller solutions to planting have become the replacement for land or a solution to work inconveniently to accommodate capitalist systems.
Global disasters, both natural and systematic, are constant reminders of how we are working against ourselves. When occurrences remind us how material accumulation cannot save us against these disasters, we can be reminded of how sustainable indigenous knowledge allowed us to live. When I see global disasters like COVID, what is happening to the people of Gaza, Congo, and many others, and even the recent fires in LA, I think people are left in communities of struggle, thinking about how to rebuild. I often think of how dependent we have become on the capitalist system. Rebuilding can look impossible when we no longer have the knowledge of sustainability that is transferred through indigenous knowledge. Our dependency on speaking colonial languages leaves us with limited access to the knowledge of surviving in harmony with nature.
It is in the songs we sing as children in school, in the languages we speak, the things we buy, the professions we spend our whole lives working towards that the magic is slowly dying and nature slowly turns its back on us as we do the same. That is a global problem and not only a South African problem as a result of its histories.
These interviews were conducted with artists participating in the SOLO section of the 2025 Investec Cape Town Art Fair.