Manyaku Mashilo was born in 1991 in Limpopo, South Africa and is currently based in Cape Town, South Africa.  Dedicated to the act of cherishing lineage, Manyaku Mashilo creates otherworldly re-imaginings with precise linework. The portraits capture the self, representing a black, queer community cloaked, clothed and bathed in celestial cartographies. The enmeshed figures perform a multiplication of mappings piecing together dimensions of time, place and space, offering the land and the body as the source of a complex question of spiritual identity.

Mashilo had been commissioned to produce artworks, this has been put on hold due to the lack of payment of PESP funds by the NAC.