Mpho Mazibuko
Keneiloe-mpho Mazibuko otherwise known as Mpho to many is a young, black south African artist. Born in Soweto but grew up in Johannesburg south. Mpho has always been passionate about storytelling and art, so much so that she wrote her own stories online as a child and was self-taught in art. Her hunger for art began to blossom as she took art in high school and university. Art has always been her great escape and the place where her truths, anxieties and beliefs could be expressed.
Mpho is currently pursuing her Honours degree in Fine Arts at The University of Johannesburg Auckland Park. Her work centers around the idea of storytelling and capturing narratives. Due to her living between her family’s informal settlements, her own neighborhood in Turffontien and Rosettenville as well as Soweto where her extended family resides, she interviews family members, friends, neighbors, and people she sees on a daily to capture their stories and allow people to explain where they came from and what they experience. She uses thrown away objects and recycled material such as tyres, dustbin lids, buckets, pans, baths, and suitcases as some of the martials she has worked with, to convey her work and the beauty in the discarded.
What drive her creativity is storytelling and poetry, the lives she is met by and the people whom she sees are important to her art. She is always eager to speak and stand up for the untold stories, be it a brother who does drugs, or a prostitute who is misunderstood.