Sihle Motsa

Sihle Motsa is an Art Historian and Art practitioner who earned her Master’s in Art History at the University of the Witwatersrand. She has worked as a lecturer, researcher and writer, authoring texts for the Daily Maverick, Artthrob, Atlantica Contemporaries amongst others. She has curated exhibitions that speak to a myriad of themes including black material cultures, ecological vernaculars and black women’s artistic practices. She is currently pursuing a second Master’s degree with the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. She is the 2023 Marie-Solanges Apollon Scholarship holder and part of the DAAD MuseumsLab 2024 cohort. Her work seeks to co-construct a vernacular lexicon with the people of kwaZulu Natal as a means of reckoning with the province’s ongoing political and ecological turmoil. Her work figures black cultural, aesthetic, artistic and intellectual traditions as pertinent to the work of comprehending the entangled political and ecological realities. As such, it works through archival and historical sites and space of contemporary community organising to create narratives that are representative of life at the nexus of climate injustice and endemic violence.