LESEDI LEDWABA
Participant
Lesedi Ledwaba is a South African visual artist, born in Zebedia, Limpopo. Ledwaba started her career as an artist in high school where she majored in Visual Arts. She holds a National Diploma in Fine and Applied Arts majoring in Painting and Print making from Tshwane University of Technology. She then continued to study education at the University of South Africa (Early Childhood Development) in 2017, majoring in Visual arts and Music. Ledwaba served as an education assistant and tour guide at the Pretoria Art Museum where her work was later featured in the For-Sale Project and Genesis II exhibition in June 2018. She participated in the VANSA Curatorial Internship under the supervision of Mr AM Letsoalo at the Polokwane Art Museum. Her love for teaching and the arts led to her co-founding The Legae Art Society, NPC; that aims at giving art lessons to scholars in and around the Limpopo province. A digital shot by Ledwaba titled “Leéto la koko” (My grandmother’s journey) took third place in the July My Creations Competition in 2021. The Art Bank of South Africa acquired her work that year, and it is now a part of the organization’s permanent collection. In addition to working as an education assistant in the foundation phase at Greenside Primary School in Polokwane and continuing to pursue her PGCE (Postgraduate certificate in Education), Lesedi was a member of the project management support team for the National PESP Public Art Mural Painting in Limpopo in 2022. She was also a freelance visual artist and photographer.
Religion and spirituality
My goal with this series of my artwork is to portray religion/spirituality from 2 points of view practiced by one person. It’s interesting to me how, growing up, I knew that the church and African traditional practices were on opposite ends of the spectrum, and that the term “religion” was frequently used to refer to institutionalized systems of beliefs, the service and worship of God, and what I for a long time mistakenly thought of as anything “chur.” I recently discovered and came to understand that, on the other side, spirituality refers to the component of mankind that describes the ways in which people look for and express meaning and purpose, as well as their connection to themselves, nature, or even to the meaningful or sacred. Using images of Dragon, I follow the spiritual guide and prophet Dragon through his journey of religion and spiritual practice in this series of my artwork. A Prophet at an apostolic church and, on the other hand, a traditional healer or sangoma are used to illustrate religion and spirituality from a different angle to discover the similarities and differences between the ways that various rituals are performed in the church and in the sangomas’ hut. I’ve discovered that, with a minor variance in translation, some behaviors are quite similar throughout a wide range of religious denominations and across diverse ethnic/cultural traditions.