Legae / Khaylethu

Bruce Bowale and Chumisa Fihla

26.11.20 - 14.01.21

AVA Mezzanine Gallery

Legae/Khayalethu, a two-man exhibition by Bruce Bowale and Chumisa Fihla, explores themes of home, personal growth, and yearnings. Two artists from different backgrounds, the Bapedi tribe and isiXhosa tribe respectively, meet and tell their stories. As leitmotif the exhibition embraces homesickness - the feeling of remembering home through a lens of sentiments impacted by social, educational, and environmental changes that have taken place to affect one's personal experience.

Bruce Bowale is a South African-born artist from Pretoria. During school Bowale explored various creative pursuits, such as dance, music, drama, and gumboots dance. His first public outing as an artist was in the form of a mural painted at Pretoria National Zoo. He went on to obtain his National Diploma in Fine Arts from the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) in 2018. During his studies at TUT, Bowale also found time to participate in the Pretoria Art Museum Educational Assistance (EA) development program to become an art tour guide and an art facilitator.

In 2018 Bowale was amongst the top five short-listed candidates for the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) scholarship and participated in his first group exhibition at the Pretoria Art Museum. In 2018 he featured in the top 40 and top 100 of the States of The Art (SOTA) and Thami Mnyele Fine Arts Awards competition respectively. In 2019 he was selected for the Artist Career Boot Camp (ACBC) and was mentored by Lesley Cohn from Art Source South Africa. This program was funded by the National Arts Council of South Africa (NAC) in association with the Bag Factory Artists’ Studios, where the program took place.

Chumisa Fihla was born in Cape Town in 1996 and stuided at Fish Hoek High School before finding a mentor in Mandy Johnston and becoming a fellow of the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of Western Cape (UWC), through its artist-in-residence program.

While his family originates from Alice in the Eastern Cape, Fihla grew up in a township called Masiphumele in the Western Cape. As a young artist, Fihla was inspired by his father, who is a welder, as well as by the work of Willie Bester. Fihla, too, builds sculptures with scrap metal, from his workshop in Masiphumelele. None of his siblings were able to further their careers in arts, but Fihla is determined to turn this tide. Not only as a sign of positive change in his own family, but to bring positive change in his community, too.