BIOGRAPHY
Vusi Khumalo completed his basic education in Germiston, thereafter spending 10 years working in various companies in South Africa. In 1986, while working in Germiston, Khumalo left South Africa because of the political climate, especially as a long-standing member of the African National Congress. Khumalo departed with his family for ANC camps located in Zambia and Tanzania. It was in Dakawa Camp, Tanzania, where he first had the opportunity to explore fully his life-long hobby, art. Having completed his 0-level General Certificate of Education through correspondence with the University of London, Khumalo began to be trained in and, later, to teach textile printing, art and design. This culminated in a summer course in art in the Gerlesberg Art School, Sweden, in 1991. In 1992, Khumalo was repatriated, and the Dakawa Art and Craft Community Centre was re-established in Makhanda, Eastern Cape. He continued to teach there and his efforts won him a one-year scholarship to the Konstfack National Art College, Stockholm.
After having returned from exile in 1992, Vusi Khumalo became fascinated with the burgeoning shanty towns that mushroomed around the urban centres of South Africa. With the scrapping of the Urban Areas Act, “influx controls” and forced removals, many of the previously-disenfranchised rushed to the cities to seek work and stake their claim on land bordering the cities. Open fields and abandoned land quickly transformed into what are now called informal settlements.
Khumalo set about reconstructing these explosions of humanity, using the very materials that the shanty town was built of – corrugated iron, earth, wood, plastic – pioneering a way of seeing that has since been mimicked by many street artists plying their trade at markets and traffic lights.
What set Khumalo apart then and now is the extraordinary sense of perspective that he brings to his works, as well as an authentic technical genius that recreate these scenes in a hyper-real way, like a diorama, “recording tomorrow’s history today,” as he likes to say. Interestingly and naively, we all thought at the time that these expanding informal settlements would rapidly give way to formal housing arrangements as the Reconstruction and Development programme ostensibly swung in to gear. Decades on they appear very much here to stay, not as launch pads to formal housing, but for many as permanent homes. Indeed Khumalo tracks this “formalising the informal” and, while many of his earlier works depicted utterly treeless, muddy wastelands with our fellow citizens going about their daily lives against all odds, now the trees and the notorious bucket system toilets are peppered throughout the urban “village”, and Khumalo notices that churches and community centres have emerged.
In this sense, Khumalo continues to record history and assert the humanity at the heart of these organic cityscapes, populated by ordinary people going about the everyday, and testifying to the irrepressible human spirit that conjures community out of chaos.
2016 Opening Gallery Exhibition, CIRCA Gallery, London, UK
Winter Collection, Group Show, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
2015 Empire, Group Exhibition, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa
2014 People and Places, Group Exhibition, Imibala Gallery in association with Everard Read, South Africa
Postcards from Mzansi, Solo Exhibition, Everard Read Cape Town, South Africa
2013 Possessed, Group Exhibition, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa
Centenary, Group Exhibition, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa
Khumalo, Mzimba, Dyaloyi, Three Man Exhibition at Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa
2009 The City, Group Show, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa
2008 The Wave, Chinese Cultural Exchange, the Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
2007 One Man Exhibition, Portland Gallery, London, UK
Exhibition at the Hubei Institute, Wuhan China as the second leg of a cultural exchange
2006 Cultural Exchange – A group exhibition exploring China with 4 Professors from The Hubei Institute of fine art after a
Abstraction, Solo Show, Everard Read, Johannesburg, South Africa
2004 One Man Exhibition, Portland Gallery, London, UK
2003 Solo Show, Everard Read, Johannesburg, South Africa
2000 One Man Exhibition, October at the Portland Gallery, London, UK
1998 Solo Exhibition, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa
1996 Two Man Exhibition, Two World with Roxandra Dardagan and Skotnes Gallery,
Me and Myself, Solo Exhibition, Wezandla Art Gallery, Port Elizabeth Textile Art Printing and Painting, South Africa
1995 Manscape, Solo Exhibition, Wezandla Gallery, Port Elizabeth, South Africa
1994 One-man Exhibition, Konstfack National Art College, Stockholm, Sweden
1989-91 Part of a touring group exhibition in Sweden and Norway
Cazenove & Co, Johannesburg
Coca Cola South Africa
Calajero
Capital Alliance Holdings
Daimler Chrysler (S.A.)
Didata, Johannesburg
E.F.T Corporation
F.B.C. Fidelity Bank
Fisher Hoffman And Sithole
Mckinsey & Co (Usa)
Merril Lynch
Mvelaphanda Holdings
Old Mutual Plc (London)
Privest, Johannesburg
Sanlam
Standard Bank Investment Corporation Ltd
Telkom
Task Uk Ltd
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