SMAC is pleased to be exhibiting a Group Presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025. Participating artists include Frances Goodman, Wallen Mapondera, Marlene Steyn and Baba Tjeko. Find us at Booth F29 in the Main Gallery Section, 5 - 7 December at Miami Beach Convention Center, 1901 Convention Center Drive, Miami Beach, Forida.

South African artist Frances Goodman (b. 1975, Johannesburg) is an interdisciplinary artist who works across installation, photography, sculpture, and sound, articulating a nuanced inquiry into contemporary femininity. Her work engages critically with constructions of beauty and desire, interrogating the ways in which female identity is shaped, disciplined, and often destabilised by pervasive media narratives and societal expectations. Goodman employs materials and techniques traditionally associated with dressmaking, craft, adornment, and the broader beauty economy—acrylic nails, false eyelashes, sequins, needlework, and crochet—mobilising them as both medium and metaphor. Through this recontextualisation, she subverts the visual lexicon of beauty culture, exposing the mechanisms through which identity becomes commodified and aestheticised.

Zimbabwean multidisciplinary artist Wallen Mapondera (b. 1985, Harare) operates at the intersection of painting, sculpture, and installation, employing a complex material lexicon drawn from the detritus of everyday commerce. His practice centres on the transformation of discarded packaging—egg cartons, cardboard, textile remnants—through processes of cutting, stitching, layering, and modular aggregation. These acts of meticulous reconstitution engage with questions of labour, temporality, and resourcefulness within a socio-economic landscape defined by precarity, hyperinflation, and systemic dispossession. Mapondera’s material strategies resonate with the principles of Arte Povera while entering into dialogue with contemporary African practitioners such as El Anatsui, Ibrahim Mahama, and Nnenna Okore, who similarly transpose modernist legacies into explorations of postcolonial and socio-cultural discourse. In Mapondera’s hands, the discarded is neither inert nor valueless; it is reclaimed as a site of memory, symbolic potency, and ontological flux.

South African artist Marlene Steyn (b. 1989, Cape Town) is a figurative painter and sculptor whose practice is grounded in radical theory, psychology, and art-historical memory. Drawing from a wide range of references, Steyn’s elaborate serial “self-portraits” seamlessly interweave self-reflection with the quest for connection. Part dreamscape, part landscape, and part portraiture, Steyn’s practice knits figures together in forms that evoke the partially dissociated, half-remembered language of dreams. She explores her figures in myriad ways, intricately connecting them with their surroundings and the spaces between, often intentionally blurring the line between positive and negative space. The environments she depicts are regularly animated with human faces—reams of noses and knowing eyes, smiling lips, and undulating, unfolding bodies—expressing the notion of embodiment as intrinsically linked to other bodies: human, animal, mythical, and otherwise. Here, the female form takes center stage amid a fusion of organic and domestic elements as Steyn seamlessly interweaves self-reflection with the search for connection, drawing inspiration from diverse aspects of her own life, including femininity, motherhood, and childlike wonder.

South African multidisciplinary artist Baba Tjeko (b. 1985, Vredefort) employs bold linework as a conduit through which he interrogates cultural memory and identity within the contemporary visual sphere. His meticulously composed works synthesize traditional and digitally mediated painting techniques into complex, collage-like compositions that traverse multiple visual languages—from geometric abstraction and figuration to expressionism and the surreal. Working across printmaking, drawing, graphic design, painting, and illustration, Tjeko stages a sustained dialogue between Basotho visual traditions and Eurocentric aesthetic frameworks, producing monumental works that critically examine the ways in which traditional culture informs, shapes, and is reconfigured in contemporary constructions of Black identity.

Tjeko’s complex compositions reflect a nuanced dialogue between heritage and contemporary modes of expression. His monochromatic portraiture evokes personal and communal memory, drawing from his working-class upbringing and emphasizing qualities of simplicity, kindness, love, and community—values he perceives as increasingly absent in a digitally mediated, image-conscious society. In his colourised works, Tjeko captures the stylized, digitized aesthetics of contemporary life while tracing an emotional lineage back to his home, honoring the shapes, colours, and traditions that inspire him.