Zenaéca Singh

South Africa

About the Artist

Zenaéca Singh’s work explores the complex history of the sugar economy in South Africa and its entanglement with exploitative labour practices, migration, colonialism, and the dynamics of the domestic sphere. Working across painting, sculpture and installation, Singh interrogates the largely state-produced archive of images and text related to indentured South African Indians in the period 1860 – 1911.

Her current work translates this archival material into image sequences and alluring sculptures made from molasses and sugar in different states of solidity and fluidity.  

Her sculptures of melting sugar ships recall the fluid connection between India and South Africa across the Indian Ocean, a relationship fortified by Britain’s colonisation of both countries in the late 19th Century. Fixed in resin, frozen in a state of perpetual transition and collapse, these ships evoke the temporal suspension of the archive: it is both fluid and static, borne of the past and unresolved in the present and future.

Singh’s work uses domestic objects and scenarios to contextualise her sculptures and painting, tracing connections between the sugar economy and its impacts on domestic culture and conventions for South African Indians. Singh acknowledges the gendered history of the home space, both within her specific research frame and more broadly, situating her own making and identity in relation to this history. 

Singh completed her MFA at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art, where she received multiple awards for her BA degree in Fine Art. Singh was also a UCT Accelerated Transformation of the Academic Programme (ATAP) Fellow. She has has participated in multiple exhibitions and art fairs, and her work sits in several private collections. In 2024 she was commissioned to make a work for the new Fenix museum of migration in Rotterdam, Netherlands, which opens in May 2025.

Exhibitions

  • 2025 All Directions, permanent exhibition at Fenix Museum, Rotterdam
  • 2025 Investec Cape Town Art Fair with Guns & Rain, Cape Town
  • 2024 Entangled: Colonialism, Monuments & Memory, Guns & Rain group exhibition at Rhodes House, Oxford
  • 2024 Into One’s Own: Reckoning with Monuments & Memory, group exhibition at Guns & Rain, Johannesburg
  • 2024 DECADE : 10 Years of Guns & Rain (group exhibition), Johannesburg
  • 2024 Investec Cape Town Art Fair with Guns & Rain, Cape Town
  • 2023 Us, two-person exhibition with Bougaard, Guns & Rain, Johannesburg
  • 2023 Greatest Hits: Leeuwenhof Slave Quarters Remembrance Gallery, 4th Iteration with AVA
  • 2023 Investec Cape Town Art Fair, Church Projects Anti-Booth intervention
  • 2022 Tracing the Home, Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town
  • 2022 Fresh Voices, Guns & Rain, Johannesburg
  • 2022 Smoke & Ash: The Jagger Library Memorial Exhibition, University of Cape Town

Collections

  • Fenix Museum, Netherlands
  • Amawal Collection, Spain
  • ARAK Collection, Qatar

Grants, Residencies and Awards

  • 2023 Accelerated Transformation of the Academic Programme (ATAP) Fellowship
  • 2022 Simon Gerson Prize, Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town
  • 2022 Dean Merit List, Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town
  • 2021 Deans Merit List, Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town
  • 2019 Buntman Family Achievement Award
  • 2018 Top Performing Student in Visual Arts in Gauteng District

Selected Works

In tomorrow’s journey home,

2024
Resin coated on molasses on sugar paste
10.5 x 15 cm

It’s playtime series of 5

2025

Molasses on sugar paste and resin

9 x 12 cm each

Legacies

2025

Molasses on cotton

90 x 60 cm

The stare

2024
Molasses on cotton, found vintage frame
15.5 x 11 cm

Family Vacation: Part One

2024
Molasses, sugar paste and resin
9 x 8.5 cm

High Tea

2023
Sugar, clay and resin
24 x 23 x 23 cm

the S.S Truro

2022
Sugar and resin
17 x 23 x 10 cm

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