The new communication project of MIA Photo Fair 2018 that belongs to the Les Êtres D’Africadia series, created by the South African artist Siwa Mgoboza (Cape Town, 1993) is selected in collaboration with African Artists’ Foundation and Lagos Photo Festival to represent MIA Photo Fair 2018.

Siwa Mgoboza explores notions of difference and belonging as informed by his personal experiences of prejudice and assimilation. Growing up abroad and subsequently returning to South Africa as a young man, Mgoboza was profoundly struck by the difference between his expectation of an egalitarian South Africa and the stark contrast of it’s reality.

Siwa Mgoboza (b. 1993) holds a BA Fine Art from Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town (2015), He was awarded the Eduard Louis Laden Art Bursary (2015), the Cecil Skotnes Award (2015) and the Michaelis Bursary (2012 and 2015). He was named the 2015 Young + African Visual Artist of the Year by Creative Nestlings. Having been raised abroad for most of his life, Mgoboza’s work deals with a globalized African sense of self, a Western upbringing, and the liminal spaces in which these identities exist. Mgoboza has exhibited in a number of group shows in South Africa with, AVA Gallery, SMAC Gallery, Gallery MOMO, WHATIFTHEWORLD, Lizamore and Associates, Barnard Gallery, Hazard to name few . He was a finalist in Sasol New Signatures (2015), Barclay’s L’Atelier top 100 (2016), and SA Taxi Awards top 30 finalist at Lizamore & Associates Gallery. He was featured at the PGH Photo Fair at the Carnegie Museum, USA and his work was included in the !Kauru Contemporary African Art Project: Being and Becoming, at the Unisa Art Gallery in Pretoria, South Africa.