At Röda Sten Konsthall in Gothenburg, Nontokozo Tshabalala’s performance iNkululeko began with an invitation to freedom. The gallery described a journey between the present and the future, with experimental sound design by Samar Jabri. Songs of struggle met vibrations, humming and sounds of possible things to come. The work did not treat the future as a distant setting that an audience could only observe. It asked people to move toward it together.
That invitation makes sense within Tshabalala’s practice. The South African-born artist, designer and poet has called herself an Afrofuturist and made work in Sweden that uses image, sound, writing and public participation to ask how Black people can occupy space on their own terms. The Röda Sten account of its 2023 summer exhibition identifies her as one of four artists in a programme concerned with freedom, identity and the social structures that shape them. It names iNkululeko as a newly made performance at the opening. The title’s meaning, freedom, is given by the institution itself.
There is a difference between declaring a better future and composing the conditions in which people might rehearse one. Tshabalala works along that difference. In iNkululeko, a journey was shared through sound and performance. In Melanin Spaces, her design research asked how public spaces are configured for people of African descent. In the 2023 workshop JAG ÄR!, or I AM!, young participants made statements on clothing. Each project uses a different form, but none leaves the spectator in the passive position of being told that representation matters. The work gives people something to do, make, hear or say.
Tshabalala was born and raised in Standerton, South Africa. She studied graphic design at the University of Johannesburg and later design at the University of Gothenburg, according to the Mail & Guardian’s 2023 profile. During her years in Sweden she lived and worked in Gothenburg and Malmö. A 2025 One Club biography says she had recently relocated back to South Africa. Her Nordic years remain a substantial chapter in an artistic practice that continues across places.
Sounding freedom
The description of iNkululeko is unusually specific about sound. The struggle song carries a history of collective resistance. Humming can be shared even without a common lyric. Experimental sound design can open a path from those inherited forms toward a less predictable acoustic future. Tshabalala designed the piece as a passage between now and what comes next. Voices and sounds gave that passage a collective form. Freedom was something participants could approach through listening and joining in, rather than a word suspended above the performance.
The performance took place on the opening day of an exhibition bringing together artists with different feminist approaches. The other works involved dance, drawing, sculpture and installation. Tshabalala’s presence in that context need not be interpreted as a claim that all four artists worked in Afrofuturism. The relation is more precise. Her self-described Afrofuturist practice met an exhibition focused on how identities are constructed and how art may practise freedom. iNkululeko gave that shared concern a route through Black memory and speculative sound.
There is a risk in hearing freedom as an uncomplicated destination. The performance’s connection to struggle songs resists it. A song carried from a movement into a gallery is not just atmosphere. It can remind listeners that the freedom being invited has been pursued before and remains unfinished. At the same time, the new sound design refuses to leave the work enclosed by the past. An audience is asked to feel the friction between inherited resistance and possibilities not yet composed.
Tshabalala’s invitation is personal in tone, but its form is public. A voice offering to hold someone’s hand through a journey is different from an institution announcing that progress has already been achieved. The first admits uncertainty and asks for company. The second can turn aspiration into a publicity slogan. iNkululeko belongs to the first kind of address. Its future is a relation among people moving toward something together.
The public space already has a design
Tshabalala’s Melanin Spaces project was presented by Public Art Agency Sweden as an exploration of public spaces and the ways they are configured for and by people of African descent. This is a design question with political consequences. A square, a gallery, a school or a street may be described as open to everyone while some people experience it through surveillance, suspicion or the expectation that they explain their presence. Spatial design includes paths and furniture, but also habits of use and rules about who is made comfortable.
The agency placed Tshabalala’s project in a podcast series about public space, decolonial methods and listening. Its account says she uses images and poetry to explore her position as a Black South African woman. Those media allow a designer to work with more than a plan or a map. A poem can register the interior pressure of a place; an image can show what official diagrams omit. The project’s premise is that space has been configured, so it can also be reconfigured. The future begins by refusing to call the existing arrangement natural.
This approach grows from her training without being confined by it. In a 2021 interview with Bizcommunity, Tshabalala said graphic design appealed to her because it could offer creative solutions across many problems. She described drawing, illustration, project development and connection between people as parts of her work. Her practice moves across the boundary between a commissioned identity and a self-directed social question. The skills are related, but the aims change with the project.
In the same interview, she discussed leaving advertising and making work important to her even with modest resources. That statement gives Melanin Spaces an economic dimension. An artist need not wait for a large institution to commission a perfect version of a project before a question can be made public. Small-scale image-making, conversation and a space occupation can begin to change what is visible. Of course, resources still matter. The point is not to praise scarcity. It is to understand why Tshabalala sees creative agency in the ability to start.
Making a statement wearable
At Malmö Konsthall’s 2023 JAG ÄR! workshop, Tshabalala invited young people to print or spray statements on T-shirts. The museum’s programme framed the session as an antiracist exercise in personal expression. The garment could carry a playful, political or intimate declaration. It would leave the workshop with its maker and circulate through everyday streets, rather than remain an object on a gallery wall.
The title’s first-person form matters. I am is an incomplete sentence until someone chooses what follows. A young participant can fill it without needing an artist to supply an approved identity. That is a small but consequential shift in authorship. Tshabalala provides techniques and a public framework; the wearer decides the statement. The workshop gives a body a portable surface on which to speak in its own words.
The work also complicates a division between art and design. A T-shirt has a use outside the museum. Printing on it is an aesthetic act, but also a decision about where a message will travel and who may read it. Tshabalala’s design background is visible in that attention to circulation. The statement is not finished when the paint dries. It continues in the movement of the wearer and the responses of others.
An antiracist workshop with young people can be described in generic language of empowerment. The actual design is more interesting. It offers a limited material kit, a clear invitation and enough freedom for distinct results. Participants can make claims about themselves that may be humorous, uncertain, angry or celebratory. The artist’s task is not to control those claims but to help establish the conditions for making them visible. That method shares something with iNkululeko: both works construct an invitation instead of presenting freedom as an image already complete.
Across a divided geography
Tshabalala’s co-curation of Neither Here Nor There at Konsthallen Blå Stället in Gothenburg adds another dimension to this practice. The 2021 group exhibition brought together several artists around the complexity of Blackness and national identity. A contemporary account of the exhibition describes works that critiqued the existing world and offered hints of other possible worlds. The exhibition initially appeared digitally because the venue was closed during the pandemic. That mode of access was a condition of the time, not a general description of the works’ media.
To curate such a programme is to organise relations among different artists rather than project one’s own view through every object. The exhibition’s title rejects the demand to belong without remainder to either a place of origin or a place of residence. It also resists the idea that a person who crosses borders becomes simply suspended between them. Art can build a third, active position from which to think and make. Tshabalala’s curatorial work gave that position a shared public form.
Her own movement between South Africa and Sweden makes this question biographically resonant, but the exhibition should not be collapsed into autobiography. The participating artists came with distinct histories and techniques. A curator can create a frame in which those differences speak to one another without making them identical. The work is an exercise in composition at the scale of a group: choosing, placing and inviting relation.
That exercise also informs Mam’Gobozi Design Factory, the studio Tshabalala co-founded with Osmond Tshuma. A University of Johannesburg alumni profile describes the studio as an attempt to celebrate African identity and question design conventions inherited from Western branding. Its name refers to a familiar community figure, an auntie who knows and shares what is happening. The studio’s emphasis on experiment and play is part of its design ethic. It seeks a future for African design that is made by its practitioners, not merely assigned a marketable look from elsewhere.
The studio and the art projects are not the same thing, but they share a concern with authorship. Who defines the image of a community? Who makes the brief? Who has the freedom to be more than a client’s stereotype or an institution’s diversity illustration? Tshabalala’s work across these forms is a sequence of answers that remain practical. Make an exhibition, form a studio, compose a performance, let someone place a statement on a shirt.
Possibility as a method
In the Mail & Guardian’s profile, Tshabalala describes her work as navigating the world as a Black South African woman while creating possibilities within and beyond that position. The phrase beyond is the key to her Afrofuturism. Experience provides material and urgency. It does not set the ceiling for what she may imagine or do. Her practice uses colour, collage, poetry, design and organisation to resist that ceiling.
The work is also grounded in relationships across generations. Tshabalala has spoken about her grandmother’s encouragement and about the effect her own creative path had on younger relatives. In her Bizcommunity interview, she treated a nephew’s wish to be an artist as a career highlight. That is not a sentimental detail detached from the art. It shows how a future becomes conceivable through example. The child does not have to reproduce her career. He can see that creative work is a possible life.
Krull’s piece on The Audience Club and STHLM DANS considers how audiences meet contemporary performance. Tshabalala’s iNkululeko asks a related question from the maker’s side: what can an artist do to turn spectators into fellow travellers through a difficult idea? The two projects have different histories and aims, but both treat the audience as active in the event’s meaning.
Tshabalala’s 2025 move back to South Africa, as recorded by the One Club, does not close the Nordic chapter of her practice. The works made and presented in Sweden remain part of Swedish contemporary art’s conversation with Black futures. They also connect to a studio, family and artistic community in South Africa. A transnational practice need not choose one side as its authentic home. It can insist that ideas, methods and people move, and that the future is made through those movements.
The most compelling image of Tshabalala’s work may be the invitation rather than the finished object. iNkululeko invites an audience through sound toward freedom. Melanin Spaces invites reconsideration of who public space is for. JAG ÄR! invites a young person to decide what a garment will say. None guarantees a transformed society. Each creates a situation in which someone can act as if another arrangement is possible, then carry that action outside the immediate event. This is how her Afrofuturism works: a future enters the room as a question people can answer together.