LESEGO SEOKETSA

Her practice investigates the construction of African womanhood within postcolonial and late-capitalist frameworks, focusing on beauty, adornment, and aspiration as social and economic signifiers. Engaging personal and collective histories, her work examines how identity is negotiated amid imperial legacies, consumer culture, and contemporary modes of self-presentation.

Her work considers how African women navigate identity and liberation in a capitalist postcolonial world, positioning beauty as a language of survival, aspiration, and self-expression. Through engagement with her heritage, Seoketsa understands that independence does not equal agency; autonomy requires self-definition beyond inherited narratives. It is through contrast—between past and present, excess and restraint, belonging and alienation—that the contours of freedom emerge.

In South Africa’s post-apartheid reality, the promise of liberation remains unresolved, a tension intensified by late-stage capitalism. Displays of aspiration within her community operate as both aesthetic language and survival strategy, reflecting a desire for access to forms of abundance historically denied.

Beauty and adornment function as social currency: the quality of hair, nails, and bodily maintenance communicates class, respectability, and belonging. Seoketsa frames beauty as an economy of womanhood through which modernity is negotiated. While these practices offer visibility and access, they also expose the pressures of Western and capitalist ideals.

She contrasts contemporary aesthetic practices with imagined ancestral modes of care, ritual, and plant medicine rooted in spirituality rather than performance. Photography documents these negotiations as they exist, while painting enables abstraction and reinterpretation, filtered through the gaze of her inner child. This process holds both fascination and grief, as contemporary self-presentation often mirrors submission to systems that commodify identity.

Her work explores fragmentation through innocence, play, and visual excess, holding space for repression and desire. Ultimately, Seoketsa asks whether ancestral identity can endure within the architecture of empire, or whether liberation requires its reshaping from within. She seeks to reclaim beauty as a site of memory, power, and play—one through which African identity can speak to itself anew.