Two chairs sit in an imagined room whose past cannot be held inside a single date. Atang Tshikare’s Leifo reworks the form of an eighteenth-century French fauteuil, a chair associated with European domestic status, using South African materials and techniques linked to his family. Wood, grasses, charring and weaving bring another history into the frame. Brass beading suggests constellations and sparks. The chairs were made for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room, but they do more than fit the title of an exhibition. They make a room ask whom it has been built to welcome.
The Met’s account of Leifo describes Tshikare’s use of knowledge passed down from his grandmother and his decision to revisit a French chair type introduced during colonization. The work does not pretend that a chair can undo that history. It changes the balance of authority in a familiar object. The imported form remains visible, but its surface and making no longer belong solely to the history that introduced it. A person sitting in the room encounters inheritance as a set of choices still being made.
Tshikare was born in South Africa and works from Cape Town. His Everard Read biography names his Tswana heritage and describes an Afrofuturistic practice across sculpture, furniture and other materials. The label is useful when it points to a particular operation: he brings inherited knowledge into objects that belong to possible futures, rather than treating the inheritance as an aesthetic from which contemporary design must graduate. Leifo makes that operation tactile. The future is not merely pictured; it is a chair whose surfaces and structure ask how someone might live among complicated histories.
A chair with several times inside it
The fauteuil is an exacting starting point. Upholstered chairs of this type can signify rank, comfort and an interior ordered around European taste. Tshikare does not simply cover one in a new decorative pattern. The Met describes a reimagining of a pair, with South African wood and grasses and skills such as charring and weaving. These choices alter how the chair’s body is perceived. A form once linked to colonial introduction becomes a site where local material and family technique are indispensable to the finished work.
The title Leifo is associated with a fireplace in Sotho. A hearth suggests warmth and social gathering rather than only display. These chairs can be understood as objects made for proximity: two people beside a fire, a conversation that takes time, bodies sharing a room. The museum setting gives them another life, where visitors may look without sitting. That distance is productive. The work asks what domestic intimacy means when a historically unequal encounter has shaped the furniture itself.
The brass detail extends the chair outward. According to the Met, its beading combines astrological constellations with Zulu pictograms to suggest sparks. The design travels from a hearth near the body to patterns in the sky. Neither scale cancels the other. A domestic object can contain a cosmic reference without turning into a space-age prop. The connection is made through handwork, a material line of brass, and a language of signs that does not begin or end with European ornament.
The work’s place in an Afrofuturist period room also changes how the viewer understands time. A period room usually asks visitors to enter a reconstructed past. This one proposes a household that could have existed differently and might still be imagined forward. Tshikare’s chairs do not complete that household alone. They contribute to a collective environment in which the furniture of an imagined Black life can carry histories that conventional rooms have suppressed. Their usefulness as chairs matters to the fiction. The possible future is not only a distant spectacle; it has places to sit.
Inherited technique as design knowledge
Tshikare has spoken of materials and practices handed down through his family as sources of invention. This differs from using “tradition” as a ready-made look. Charring changes wood’s surface; weaving demands repeated physical decisions about tension and connection. Such processes require skill in the present. The person who carries them is not merely preserving an old form but adapting a method to a new object and a new public setting.
His father’s visual storytelling also shaped the artist’s early life. Everard Read describes his father as an anti-apartheid activist and illustrator for pan-African publications. This inheritance is not a single motif that appears on every sculpture. It is an example of images being made under political pressure, for communities that needed other accounts of themselves. Tshikare’s movement from graphic work and street art toward sculpture can be seen as a change of medium within a continuing interest in narrative. A mark that once occupied a page or wall can become the line of a chair or the body of an imagined creature.
A Homo Faber interview describes his wish to carry Bantu philosophy and craftsmanship through contemporary design. In his workshop, soil, bronze and wood can all contribute to an object that tells a story. The differences among those substances matter. Soil can suggest the ground underfoot, wood bears growth and shaping, bronze can give a form public endurance. Tshikare’s art does not make them interchangeable symbols of African authenticity. It tests how each behaves in the hands of a maker.
The artist’s range of materials allows a thought to pass through several kinds of resistance. Clay yields differently from metal; glass catches light that wood absorbs; stone asks for another pace of working. That movement across media helps explain why his practice resists a division between art object and functional design. A chair may be sculptural, and a sculpture may recall a tool or creature. The boundary is less important than the question of what relationship the object invites: use, memory, curiosity, touch or a story imagined from its shape.
A world for a child
The project Peo e Atang gives another view of Tshikare’s future-making. In a 2021 first-person interview, he described a story begun in 2006 and revisited after his son Peo was born in 2020. The characters grew into sculptures; the sculptures called for drawings of their environment; the drawings suggested animation and music. The project was not designed as a single finished image that later acquired accessories. Its different media developed as the artist found that each one exposed a need in the others.
The son gives the work an audience close to home, but its imagined world is not reducible to a private gift. A child will inherit a planet, a social order and a set of stories that their parent cannot fully control. Tshikare’s fables let him make forms for that uncertainty. In the interview, he described the project as a larger physical narrative whose components could appear across cities and years. The future therefore enters the work both as the child’s lifetime and as the setting of tales the child may encounter.
One sculpture can return as another character or variation. Tshikare traced Le Bone Lebone, a self-portrait from 2016, into the later Ke Bone. The recurrence suggests that identity in his world is not fixed by one object. A figure can be revised as the story changes around it. The method resembles a living oral narrative more than an inventory of isolated collectibles. A character’s meaning depends on where and when it appears, and on the listener who meets it.
This is where the word Afrofuturism becomes more than a museum category. Tshikare is not simply adding African patterns to speculative creatures. He uses the materials and stories of his own life to make a world his son might enter. The work takes the future personally without pretending that a parent can make it safe by force of imagination. Its forms can be playful and protective at once. They acknowledge that a new generation will have to interpret what it receives.
The creature at Wanås
In Sweden, Tshikare’s public sculpture Puruma places a hybrid being on a lake at Wanås Konst. The institution’s account describes a body drawing from a lion and South Africa’s national protea, positioned on a nest of branches with its reflection in the water. The lion suggests force and vulnerability; the closed flower suggests what has yet to open. The sculpture does not resemble a familiar zoological specimen. Its composite body asks the viewer to consider life as connected forms rather than sealed categories.
The work’s title refers to a lion’s roar in Setswana, the artist’s mother tongue. A roar is heard, but this creature is viewed across water. The name gives the sculpture a sonic presence that the still object cannot literally produce. The eye sees a body and its reflection; the mind supplies a sound. That gap becomes part of the encounter. Tshikare’s sculptures frequently ask more than one sense to participate even when a museum or public site restricts touch.
The nest and lake make Puruma especially sensitive to its place. A nest suggests shelter, beginning and the labour of gathering pieces. Water supplies both a physical setting and an altered double of the figure. Light changes the reflection from one hour to another. The sculpture is not merely placed outdoors as an object that could have stood anywhere. Its appearance depends on wind, weather, season and the viewer’s position. The Swedish landscape becomes a collaborator without turning the creature into a Swedish animal.
Wanås connects the work to the artist’s account of a life spirit joining stones, water, plants, people, planets and stars. The sculpture’s hybrid body gives that relation form without diagramming it. A flower, lion, nest and lake appear together as an unstable whole. The future implied by the unopened protea is not a technological upgrade; it is the possibility that different living systems might still flourish together. This is a distinct future from the chairs in the Met, yet both works use an object to change how a place can be inhabited.
Across rooms and landscapes
The movement from a New York period room to a Swedish lake shows the range of Tshikare’s practice. Leifo works on the historical charge of a European furniture type within an imagined household. Puruma places a fable-like creature in a public landscape. The former asks what furniture a speculative home might contain. The latter asks how an unfamiliar being can belong to an environment already full of life. Neither depends on a glossy image of advanced technology. Their futures are carried by material decisions and by stories held in forms.
Tshikare’s Afrofuturism also makes a useful distinction between heritage and enclosure. His Tswana identity informs his art, but the work is not confined to a museum of Tswana objects. A chair can challenge the history of a French form; a sculpture can converse with a Swedish lake. The movement outward does not require the artist to set aside where he came from. It gives that knowledge a role in making new relationships possible.
Krull’s Futuristic Dreams editorial also uses style to imagine an alternative relation between history and future, though through photography and fashion in a Congolese context. Tshikare’s objects pose the question through touch, weight and site. A viewer can compare what images and objects each allow: the fashion portrait can arrange a person within a possible world, while a chair can suggest how that world might support a body. Neither replaces the other. Together they show why speculation can be built at many scales.
The most durable argument in Leifo may be almost ordinary. A person needs a place to sit near another person. The chair’s history complicates that need, but Tshikare does not abandon the object. He remakes it with knowledge that colonial interiors did not value equally. The future room becomes plausible because it contains a functional relation among bodies, materials and stories. Puruma expands that relation beyond the room to a landscape where a creature and its reflection share a place with water and sky.
Tshikare’s work does not ask us to choose between ancestry and invention. In his studio, an inherited technique becomes a way to make a new surface; an old story becomes a character in a child’s world; a lion and flower make a creature that no previous generation had to describe in exactly this form. Each object holds more than one time. The future is the next use of that knowledge, the next viewer who approaches it, and the next question a familiar room or landscape can be made to ask.