Profile: Nyakallo Maleke, 2025 Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art
By Mmathabo Maebela and Relebohile Mohapi
A day in this artist’s life consists of scouring her surroundings for materials to add to her art. It involves the rustling of wax paper and the sight of thread moving from loop to loop. A pencil in her hand signifies the climax of her day. Named the 2025 Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art, Nyakallo Maleke’s art is a practice of home, memory, and subtle resistance. A new drawing for her means a clean slate, an opportunity to tell a new story, a chance to represent oneself in a different way.
This award, for Maleke, signifies recognition, opportunities, and experience. “I think the award means that one’s hard work is paying off. There’s always somebody who’s paying attention and thinks that what you’re doing has a lot of value,” she said. Being an artist means not always getting the recognition one deserves. And art is subjective. But receiving an award of this stature propels Maleke’s art into a bigger league. The acknowledgement will further her career financially and, as it comes with a mentor, afford her more experience.
Maleke’s work is grounded in the idea of home. For most people, home is a place of acceptance, stability, and comfort. For her, however, it doesn’t exist as a permanent place. Having moved around a lot, home for Maleke is constantly changing, and so are its meanings.
In her installations, Maleke uses materials that are found in homes to connect and to find a sense of familiarity. Using domestic material – like kettles, wax paper and plastic bags – Maleke finds they can trigger certain emotions and remind her of the different locations where she has had to cultivate a home. “And those moments of crumpling wax paper? It reminds me of eating my sandwiches after school or during lunch break,” she said. Yet she does not just represent her home; she works to represent any and every home. A ‘normal’, relatable home invites audiences to connect to the art. Seeing things which are typically in homes is likely to make people reminisce.
Each piece Maleke produces is layered with repetition, memory and vulnerability through her inherited practice of stitching. These stitches symbolise, for her, making connections between her experiences and her work. She explained that the act of stitching reminds her of “when my mother used to go to sewing schools to learn how to sew and stitch because she used to make curtains”. Maleke uses line stitches, the normal back stitch, running stitches, a blanket stitch, and some freestyled forms of these stitches, incorporating knots in intuitive ways.
For the National Arts Festival, Maleke is going back to basics – pencil on paper, and the origin of her drawing practice from when she was in Switzerland. In a large-scale installation that will unapologetically take up space, she will present her audience with a 20-metre-long drawing on wax paper. With this piece, she returns viewers to a conversation she began when she presented a 15-metre drawing on wax paper as part of her MA show and briefly shown at Iziko in Cape Town in 2021. She has named her show To Teach In Ways That Teach Us To Care For The Soul. It will take place at the New Gallery in the Monument.
For Maleke, drawing has always been a part of our lives and has lately become her most common medium, although she believes it still is not practised enough, even though “Everybody is always drawing on a daily basis”. She described art as a common practice, with a shared language that shows up through the smallest gestures we make. “When you’re signing papers, when you are speaking with hands and making actions, when you’re typing, when you’re printing – you’re drawing.”
She believes drawing is the most basic form of art: “Scratching on paper trying to get one’s pen working, or writing on a piece of paper and accidentally scratching the desk beneath it.” All of it is art.
Art which Maleke wants us to appreciate.
This is the fourth of our profiles of this year’s Standard Bank Young Artist Award-winners. We are introducing six of them to you as part of our build-up to the 51st National Arts Festival.
