The artist Bongi Bengu is having a major exhibition at the Pretoria Art Museum which runs from this Saturday (September 9) until November 5. She told DIANE DE BEER about her passion which is constantly evolving and reflecting her life, her dreams and hopes:

Pictures of Bongi Bengu taken at the Pretoria Farmer’s Market by Thomas Honiball.

When you first meet Bongi Bengu it is not a surprise to learn that she is an artist. She looks like an artwork herself.

She’s brightly dressed and the one characteristic most dramatic is her laughter. This is someone who loves life and her enthusiasm is contagious. She’s also not scared of showing herself.

But when you start talking about her art, her mood is reflective. “It’s a calling,” she says about this career which she has been passionate about for the past 26 years.

Her art is all about expressing herself but also healing, she says, something she hopes those who come to her exhibition will also experience. She infuses it into everything she does, her cooking, her clothes, dancing and music choices. “Art is like breathing.”

Titled The World / Umhlaba, the exhibition has been inspired by the tarot card called The World. “It means the end of a cycle and the beginning of another,” she explains. But she expands: “It could also mean that you’re in a powerful position to manifest your desires.”

The exhibition was first held at the Alliance Francaise, Pretoria where Pretoria Art Museum curator Mmutle Kgokong first saw it and felt that the space was too small for her work. “It looks cramped,” he said and invited her to show it at the museum.

Bongi feels it was meant to be. “We create our own world,” she says and that’s why this transformation from one exhibition to the next came quite naturally to this South African, who spent her youth in exile in Geneva Switzerland where she completed most of her schooling until the last few years, which she spent at Waterford Kamhlaba in Swaziland.

Her parents (her father Sibusiso Bengu was both an ambassador and Minister of Education) felt that she needed to experience some of her school years on the African continent. And this is also where she forged her future. While doing a research project for which she earned a distinction and which included interviewing established  artists, she discovered Helen Sebidi who was an inspiration and opened her eyes – and her heart – to the art world.

“That’s when I knew,” she says about her artistic beginnings. Becoming the world traveller that she is, she later enrolled and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree at Mount Vernon College, Washington DC, and completed a Master’s degree in Fine Arts at The University of Cape Town. She has since participated in numerous international residencies and workshops.

For this current exhibition she wanted to reflect on the different stages of her work and she has tried to select pieces from all the different periods. She started with pastels and charcoals using mostly earthy colours.

Then she joined the Bag Factory Artist Studio where she did mostly collages initially and then turned to an organic period where she focussed on leaves and soil.

Only then came colour which now seem such a part of her life. She confesses that she sees herself as an artwork and when you look at her, it’s easy to see why. What a canvas she has been given to play with. It’s not only her work that turns heads.

Once she started planning this exhibition, she started a conversation with two curators, one at Washington DC’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Teresa Bush) where she had interned for a while and the other in Sweden (a South African lecturing there, Nkule Mabaso). “It was through dialogues with them about my work that I made selections,” she says. They will also be writing for her catalogue which will be available at the end of the two month exhibition.

When discussing her work, Bongi explains that she is inspired by her life and the experiences she has had. It all begins in her head, but once she starts working on paper or canvas, it’s usually something quite different that emerges.

Working mostly on your own can be quite a lonely existence, but Bongi enjoys her own company and finds her painting therapeutic. “This is how I work through problems,” she says. “I never feel alone.”

In her life as in her work, she describes herself as someone who doesn’t conform to society’s norms. “That’s not easy in my community, a single Black woman with no children!” But it’s her life and she marches to her own beat. Growing up and travelling around the world yet returning to South Africa, she functions easily wherever she finds herself.

As I watch her finding her feet at Silverton’s famous Farmer’s Market, it’s easy to believe her. She’s colourful, has a laugh that stops a crowd and a life that’s creative and of her own making.

Bongi’s Montana Birds (left) and Life of Domesticity (right)

She says she knows she was a man in her former life and that she wanted desperately to paint, but it wasn’t possible. “At that time, the women were the painters making huge murals. I knew I would come back as a woman so that I could fulfil my dream. And now I also know when women think that men have easier lives, it’s not always true!”

The exhibition will run until 5 November at the Pretoria Art Museum.

It will be opened officially by His Excellency HE Mr Antonis Mandritis, Ambassador of Cyprus and the work can be toasted courtesy of Durbanville Hills. Everyone is welcome.