Background Image Credit: tiMbuti (The Goats), 2025, Fumani Maluleke
Artbridger is proud to present a solo presentation of Fumani Maluleke’s series, “XO TA XI NA NDLELA” (It’s Going to Have a Way) at Moderne Art Fair, scheduled for October 23–26, 2025 at Place de la Concorde, Paris.
Image Credit: Vutomi I Ndlela, 2025, Fumani Maluleke
“XO TA XI NA NDLELA” (It’s Going to Have a Way)
“XO TA XI NA NDLELA” (It’s Going to Have a Way) is a deeply personal and symbolic exploration of memory, heritage, and cultural transmission through the use of traditional South African grass mats as canvases. Drawing on ancient record-keeping traditions, his work transforms these mats into living scrolls that convey the continuity of wisdom across generations, connecting past and present through rich visual narratives rooted in his rural Limpopo upbringing.
Fumani Maluleke’s artistic practice unfolds as an excavation of rural memory and belonging, rooted in the Limpopo village of Tsomo while extending toward universal questions of land, lineage, and collective inheritance. His use of charcoal, pastel, and the humble grass mat as a pictorial ground reactivates domestic material as archive, a surface upon which personal and ancestral memory converge. Maluleke’s gesture is both intimate and declarative, giving form to the lived topographies of women’s labor, communal resilience, and the subtle modernities of village life. Through his attentiveness to texture, pigment, and the elemental acts of tending, weaving, and walking, the artist crafts a language where the rural is not peripheral but foundational to a broader story of South African contemporaneity.
“XO TA XI NA NDLELA” (It’s Going to Have a Way) presents a unique opportunity for guests at the Moderne Art Fair to experience Maluleke’s first solo presentation in Paris, offering collectors an exclusive chance to engage directly with the artist who will be present throughout the show. Guests will also have the opportunity to meet the Artbridger team, fostering meaningful conversations around the work and its cultural significance.
Image Credit: Grocery, 2025, Fumani Maluleke (T), Image Credit: Grocery II, 2025, Fumani Maluleke (B)
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The mat is earth made soft. It roots you before you even
stand. To be born on a mat is to be introduced to the
ground, to the goddess, to gogo.
The same mat used for birth is often the same type used
for prayer, negotiation, healing, and burial. It represents
the cyclical nature of life, a continuous returning. We
begin and end on the mat.
Some believe the pattern of the mat, the way it was
woven, and the reeds used hold messages about the
child’s spirit. It is the first text written for your soul.
When you sit on a mat to pray, you return to the place of
your beginning.
When you lie on a mat to rest, you return to the rhythm
of the womb.
When you weep on a mat, it absorbs what your
grandmother wept before you.
To know the mat you were born on is to know a part of
your story that cannot be written in ink.
It is to remember that before you had words,
you had a place and that place held you spiritually,
wholly, unconditionally.
So honour the mat.
Lay it down with reverence.
Sit on it with presence.
Pray on it with awareness.
For it is not just a surface.
It is a sacred witness to your becoming.
– Celuxolo Stewart aka Gogo Simenjalo
About Moderne Art Fair
Scheduled for October 23–26, 2025 at Place de la Concorde, Moderne Art Fair will showcase over sixty French and international galleries in new pavilions with an expanded central aisle. Curated by a distinguished artistic committee, the program highlights dialogues across modern, contemporary, and design disciplines, plus a private photography exhibition.
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