ZINHLE KHUMALO

Zinhle holds a BFA (Hons) with cum laude from the University of the Witwatersrand (2025), where she received the Anya Millman Scholarship. Khumalo’s practice draws from African cosmology, Black ecology, hydrofeminism, and memory. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, she creates immersive spaces that evoke personal and collective memories through the poetics of entanglements between body, water, land, memory, and material. Central to her work is water, seen as both archival and sacred, embodying histories of healing and harm while connecting individual and ancestral experiences. Her work reflects a commitment to exploring African perspectives on spiritual, historical, and cultural landscapes, aspiring to reclaim, remember, and commune with ancestral legacies through sensory and ecological relationality.

Her practice investigates sensory praxis as embodied grammar through the intimacy of recognizing water and land as sentient bodies for the reclamation of memory and history beyond colonial boundaries. Grounded in Zulu cosmology, Khumalo explores water-land-body intimacies as living archives through hand-built clay. Umhla(bathi) (2024)—exhibited at Wits Art Museum’s NewWork ’24 Graduate Exhibition and Keys Mill Art’s Kids These Days (2025)—uses glazed, dried, and wild clay forms to capture water’s fleeting, nurturing yet destructive duality. This work represents water through clay as a vessel of memory and archival site, drawing a parallel to Black bodies whose fluidity and autonomy are constrained under colonialism, framed within a hydrofeminist perspective. Using found clay, the piece affirms material agency, creating immersive spaces embodying ecological relationality, cosmology, and resistance to Western ideas of water. The title umhla(bathi) means “sand” as one word, or “Earth Says” when broken down, reflecting the decoding and experimentation through which she questions Zulu etymology’s ties to land histories as metaphors of collective amnesia and recollection.