DUMELA!
Puleng Mongale is a South African visual artist. Her professional artistic career started in 2019 when she began experimenting with self-portraiture and digital collage.
“Mongale has developed a unique, referential style of digital collage that combines the familiar and the surreal, the domestic and the universal. Each work is simultaneously a form of innovative self-portraiture, with Mongale artfully inhabiting unexpected characters and situations, from the serene to the provocative. Through this process of self-imagining, the artist both reflects and reconstructs a relationship with her own heritage, particularly absorbing the lineages of the women who surround her.”
Mongale’s artistic expression is mainly influenced by the stories of the women in her life; women who raised her, and women in her family who she has heard about but never met- such as her late great-grandmother who she is named after. She also draws inspiration from the black, working-class women she encounters daily in the city. Mongale’s digital collage work is an exploration of identity and spirituality through an internal dialogue that revolves around remembrance, the establishment and maintenance of ancestral relationships, and black womanhood.
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