A small opening can decide how a whole room is seen. In Keabetswe Seema’s Behold: Mother’s Backroom, the viewer encounters a constructed interior through a peephole in a dark acrylic surface. Sound belongs to the work as well as collage. There is no sweeping view from which every object can be counted at once. The person looking has to align their body with the opening and accept a limited sightline. In the 2026 Shanghai exhibition Beholding Black Mirrors, this device turned an ordinary condition of looking into the subject of the art. Who gets to look through a door? Who built the room beyond it? And whose life has been arranged there for inspection?
Seema’s work does not answer those questions by supplying a more comprehensive picture. It changes the position of the person asking them. Her collages and dioramas bring Black women, domestic space, church imagery and official architecture into compressed environments where history feels both close and unfinished. Archival photographs, personal material and digital images can meet on the same surface. A hand, a face or a doorway can move out of its original setting into another one. The seams matter. They show that an image of the past is not neutral material, waiting to be inherited unchanged. It can be cut, joined and made to serve another account of who lived there.
Seema places Black women in possible futures without drawing spacecraft. She can alter the terms on which that woman is seen in the present, and then ask what follows if she has the power to build the space around her. In a first-person interview with iQHAWE, Seema names Afrofuturism among the methods she uses to explore Black female identity alongside spirituality. Her 2024 exhibition in Cape Town and her 2026 presentation in Shanghai give that method distinct physical forms. The first lets collage gather a family and a possible home across time. The second makes a visitor peer into a room that refuses to surrender itself at a glance.
Cutting into the inherited image
Seema was born and raised in Johannesburg. The Everard Read account of her 2024 solo exhibition traces her shift from political science study to fine art at the University of Pretoria, and describes a practice using monotype printmaking, photography, collage and sound. Those media do different jobs. Photography can preserve the fact that a person stood before a camera; collage can refuse the belief that the photograph tells the whole story. A printed image can be cut so that its edge meets an image from another era. Sound can put a voice or atmosphere into a room without fixing the body that produced it in one visible place.
The gallery says Seema works with family archives, newspapers and magazines. The sources of an image already carry a hierarchy. A family photograph belongs to a private history, although that history may be touched by public events. A newspaper clipping arrives with a publisher’s selection and caption. A magazine cutout may come from a commercial fantasy about beauty, class or aspiration. Seema does not make these differences disappear. Her method gives them a new relation. Cutting is not destruction for its own sake. It is a way to take an image out of a frame that has claimed to explain it.
In the iQHAWE interview, Seema connects this process to the women in her family. She speaks of growing up within a matriarchal household and of making work that includes not only her own likeness but the identities of women whose lives formed hers. A face may therefore belong to a single person and to a longer line at once. That complexity resists the easy portrait, which asks an individual image to stand as a complete account of an individual life. Seema’s repeated figures, altered limbs and layered settings suggest an identity built through relation and change. They also leave room for a viewer to notice that Black women have frequently been pictured by institutions that had little interest in their own definitions of themselves.
The titles in her 2024 exhibition Let the Fire Lead You Home move among churches, gardens, smoke, water and judgment. A Gogo’s Den invokes an elder’s space; a separate work is titled Beneath the Surface. Neither title tells the viewer exactly what will be revealed there. Touched by an Angel: Burning Not Burnt holds two states together: a body in danger and a body that has survived its passage through fire. The accompanying gallery record identifies that work as an oil-based monoprint with acrylic and collage on Fabriano paper. The material account matters because the image is neither a single untouched photograph nor an illustration detached from physical work. Ink, paint, paper and gathered fragments share the surface.
The reference to a gogo, the water, and the fire cannot be reduced to an inventory of symbols. Seema’s own account of the exhibition starts from a recurring dream about a boundary of fire that surrounded a witness without consuming them. A dream is not documentary proof of an event, yet it can supply a structure for making. Here it helped her imagine home as something not simply found at an address. The gallery’s statement presents home as a difficult, perhaps unknown place toward which the work moves. The exhibition gives that movement surfaces and rooms rather than resolving it into an uplifting slogan.
The future in a family archive
Seema’s Afrofuturism is especially legible where a family archive meets a fantasy setting. In the 2024 exhibition statement, she explains that her mother and grandmother appear in the work because her own story follows paths they walked. That is a formal choice as well as a biographical one. The person making the collage can place a face beside an object it never shared in the original photograph. She can create a meeting between generations that no single camera could have recorded. The resulting image does not pretend to be an undiscovered historical scene. It shows the work of imagining a relation across the limits of the archive.
The difference matters. An archive can reveal people whom official records neglected, but it can also carry the limits of whoever had the camera, printer or authority to preserve it. If a Black woman has been excluded from a painted sanctuary or a published account of spiritual life, a newly found document may not repair the omission. Seema’s response is to make a new arrangement. In the iQHAWE conversation, she describes using old Catholic calendars in a piece linked to resurrection, inserting Black female presence into images where she had not found it. That action does not claim the original calendar secretly contained her. It makes the absence visible by changing the picture.
Her treatment of spirituality is similarly specific. In a collage, a religious image can sit beside a personal image, but their proximity does not require them to mean the same thing. Seema asks what happens when holiness is imagined with Blackness at its centre. The question has a history of its own, reaching through colonial religious images, family practice and the institutions that define what deserves reverence. Her work does not let any one of those histories speak for the others. The cut edge between images becomes a place where a viewer can feel the distance between an inherited icon and a person who has been left out of it.
This is why the 2024 exhibition’s fire can be read as more than a sign of destruction. The gallery statement describes the dream fire as an enclosure, and Seema’s work moves between protection and threat without collapsing them. A boundary can hold a person safely, or keep them from a place they need to reach. A sanctuary can offer care, or demand that its members obey a hierarchy. Seema’s figures occupy these uncertain structures while refusing to become evidence for a simple moral. The future she claims is not one where every contradiction has burned away. It is one where Black women can make the terms by which contradictions are shown.
The combination of collage and futurity is familiar in Black visual art, but its uses differ from artist to artist. Krull’s feature on students responding to Romare Bearden considers how collage can hold multiple strands of African American history and visual culture. Seema’s South African work belongs to another time and place. Its family photographs, spiritual images and constructed interiors make a different set of claims. The useful connection is in the act of joining fragments without asking them to lose their separate origins.
What a black mirror reflects
The 2026 Shanghai exhibition Beholding Black Mirrors takes collage off the flat surface and into the space between an object and its viewer. The presenting gallery lists mixed-media collage, reflective black acrylic sheet and dioramas with sound. It names three sites in the work: the sacred, the political and the domestic. These are places where authority is made ordinary. A church can tell people how to behave before a higher power. A political institution can decide whose account becomes official. A household can teach a child who is allowed to speak, rest or watch. Seema places them close enough that their rules can be compared.
A black mirror can return an image to the person looking into it, but the reflective surface also interrupts sight. In Seema’s construction, it does not offer an unobstructed window into a supposedly authentic Black interior. The peephole works against the consumer’s desire for instant access. One has to approach, line up an eye and look from a particular position. That simple demand makes spectatorship bodily. It also exposes a limit: being allowed to see part of a room is not the same as possessing its history.
The gallery identifies Behold: Mother’s Backroom and Behold: Silence as a Declaration of War as mixed-media collage works with peephole acrylic sheets and sound, each measuring 44 by 50 by 42 centimetres. Their scale matters. A diorama is small enough to invite close attention, yet its construction can suggest a world beyond the edges a viewer can see. Sound further unsettles the border. It reaches the visitor without following the sightline through the hole. The eye and ear do not receive the same kind of access, and neither can claim to have the whole scene.
The exhibition also includes Behold: Malice at the Palace Part II. Its title sets a place of rule beside an act of harm. The gallery associates this group of works with ecclesiastical and colonial architecture and with the performance of power. Seema’s interest lies partly in where a Black woman might stand within such a structure. Would she appear as an object placed for inspection, a figure omitted from the record, or the maker of the room itself? A diorama can make that last possibility tangible. Its builder chooses walls, openings, figures and sound before the visitor arrives. The visitor’s restricted view becomes an encounter with somebody else’s design.
The Shanghai presentation changes the geography of the work’s reception. Seema brings questions formed in South African family and visual histories to a gallery in China. The black acrylic surfaces, domestic interiors and staged apertures travel into another public setting, where viewers may bring different assumptions about a Black woman’s position in a home, church or civic space. Her Johannesburg roots remain part of the work’s history; the exhibition allows its questions about Black womanhood, family and authority to meet an audience in Shanghai.
Being seen on one’s own terms
There is a tension in Seema’s work between wanting Black women to be visible and refusing the kind of visibility that strips them of control. Her iQHAWE interview describes a concern with both hypervisibility and invisibility. The two conditions can coexist. A person may be repeatedly pictured as a type while her own account is absent. A public image can make a body impossible to ignore without making its thoughts, relationships or history available. Seema’s fractured figures interrupt that bargain. They can be looked at, but they do not settle into a single usable definition.
The dioramas sharpen the problem. In a conventional display, the visitor often has the privilege of wandering around an object, deciding when enough has been seen. A peephole reverses some of that control. Seema decides where the looking begins and how much the opening gives away. The visitor is still free to interpret, but interpretation now has to acknowledge its position. This is no guarantee of ethical spectatorship. It is a designed reminder that seeing is an action with a location and a limit.
Krull’s interview with Hadil Mohamed offers another account of an artist placing Black women at the centre of her images after finding them excluded from the visual world around her. Mohamed’s Swedish portraits and Seema’s South African collages use different materials and respond to different histories. Read together, they show how representation becomes more demanding once the artist controls not only who appears but also the setting, style and terms of looking. Seema’s peephole is one answer to a question that extends far beyond a gallery: how can an image invite attention without handing its subject over to possession?
Her career is still developing. The 2024 Cape Town exhibition brought together a dream of fire, family photographs and a search for home. The 2026 Shanghai exhibition placed Black female figures inside staged interiors that speak through reflection, collage and sound. These are distinct bodies of work, and neither should be used as a key that explains every image she will make. Their shared force lies in a recurring decision about authorship. Seema cuts into received pictures, assembles spaces around figures who have been denied them, and limits the viewer’s power to say that one glance was enough.
The small opening in Behold: Mother’s Backroom finally asks for patience. It offers a view, then makes the viewer aware of the rest of the room that cannot be seen from there. Seema’s future is held in that awareness. It is not a distant year or a technological promise. It begins when the maker of an image can decide where a doorway goes, what it reveals, and which histories remain alive beyond it.