Collection: The RMA Young Artists’ Project Exhibition (YAP) 2025.

The RMA Young Artists’ Project Exhibition (YAP).

Initiated in 2002, by then KZNSA curator Storm Janse van Rensburg, The Young Artists’ Project ‘came out of a desire to create some kind of energy around young artists in the city, to get an ecosystem going around young artists, along with the writing workshop with young writers’.

The exhibitions, titled Disgust, Fear and Hell by Zama Cebsile Mwandla and Seeking by N’lamwai Chithambo.

In Disgust, Fear and Hell,  Mwandla confronts the spiritual and psychological burden of living in a world that continuously violates women physically, emotionally, and symbolically. This body of work emerges as a direct, intimate response to the violence she witnesses both in South Africa and globally: a culture of harm that infiltrates the everyday, distorts identity, and corrodes the soul.

Her visual language is rooted in symbolic storytelling, personal mythology, and the logic of dreams. Throughout the exhibition, hybrid, mystical figures part spirit, part creature populate the canvases. These beings embody complex emotional states and serve as both self-portraits and collective avatars. Drawing from religious iconography, myth, and surrealist tradition, Mwandla creates liminal spaces where the sacred collides with the grotesque, and where transformation is ongoing but unresolved.

Seeking offers a holistic view of Chithambo’s artistic journey in recent years. The exhibition brings together a collection of works unified by six recurring visual elements that have become central to his visual language: hands, wings, light shining through clouds, portraiture, figures, and the starry night. These motifs serve as symbols through which the artist articulates personal reflections and inner contemplations. While a range of sub-themes emerge, the common thread running through the work is storytelling.