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.