ABOUT STUDIO NXUMALO.
Established by outdoorsman and artist Musa N. Nxumalo, the Studio is an independent artistic research practice focused on regenerative landscapes and land stewardship. Nxumalo explores how people choose to inhabit, work with, and assume responsibility for the land through documentary photography and long-term participatory observation.
ABOUT MUSA N. NXUMALO.
Musa N. Nxumalo was born in 1986 in Soweto, Johannesburg. He began his engagement with photography at the Market Photo Workshop, where he studied between 2006 and 2008 under Sabelo Mlangeni and Thabiso Sekgala, both key figures in a new generation of contemporary South African photographers.
Throughout his career, Nxumalo has participated in international workshops and residencies and has received several awards and recognitions, including the Edward Ruiz Mentorship (2008), the ImpACT Award for Visual Art and recognition as one of the Mail & Guardian Young South Africans (2010). In 2015, he was nominated for the First Book Award by MACK Books in the UK.
His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions and exhibitions including the Biennale of Sydney (2020), the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2019), the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris (2017), and Rencontres de Bamako (2018), among many others. He currently lives and works between Johannesburg and the Free State, South Africa.
THEMES IN HIS WORK.
For the past twenty years, Nxumalo’s practice has focused on the intersections of urban youth, counterculture and identity in post-apartheid South Africa. His camera has become a tool through which to explore how new generations negotiate freedom, belonging and self-affirmation within a social and political context still marked by structural inequalities.
From early series such as Alternative-Kidz (2009) to more recent works including We Are Running Out of Hashtags! (2020), Nxumalo has portrayed Johannesburg’s nightlife, club scenes, bodies in motion and the spaces in which Black youth create their own languages of resistance and community.
His gaze is intimate and participatory. He does not observe from the outside, but from within, forming part of the cultural and social circles he documents. His work merges social portraiture with a visual poetics defined by black-and-white imagery and a deeply emotional documentary sensibility, grounded in a close connection to his subject matter.
After approximately twenty years of studying youth culture, belonging and self-affirmation, Nxumalo is expanding his artistic inquiry toward regenerative landscapes and land stewardship. Rather than a departure from his earlier work, this shift extends his longstanding interest in belonging and the relationships people form with the environments they inhabit. His current work asks, “How Do People Inhabit, Work with and Assume Responsibility for Land?” through practices of regeneration and stewardship.
Nxumalo is currently learning and developing an ecological language, both written and visual, and incorporating it into his established methods of observation and close participation. As with his earlier work, he approaches his subjects from within: living, working and learning alongside the people and landscapes he documents, allowing sustained participation to inform his photographic and moving-image practice.
STUDIO NXUMALO ARCHIVE.
Studio Nxumalo Archive is a growing collection of black-and-white photographs that explores regenerative landscapes and land stewardship through close encounters with people, land, and the spaces between them. The Archive reflects an ongoing inquiry into how land is inhabited, worked, and experienced. Rather than pursuing the “truth and factual” approach that characterises documentary photography, photojournalism, or scientific reporting, these images are shaped by an artistic interpretation of the encounters from which they emerge.
Nxumalo introduces a deliberate slowness to the development of this Archive through the use of traditional analogue photographic processes. The time between photographing, developing, and seeing the final image becomes part of the work itself, a rhythm that mirrors the pace of natural systems, where growth, decay, and renewal unfold gradually, and where attentiveness to time is essential to sustaining balance. In this way, the Archive is not only about what is seen, but about how slowly one must learn to see.
The material nature of film and the analogue process also introduces uncertainty. Technical mistakes in exposure, development, or handling are not treated as failures alone, but as part of the ecology of the process. Light leaks, underexposed frames, and chemical irregularities can echo the unpredictability of natural systems: crop failures, shifting seasons, or disrupted cycles in the landscape. These imperfections become embedded within the Archive as reminders that both image-making and ecological systems are shaped by fragility, chance, and adaptation.
Shot on film and accumulated over time, the Archive functions as both a visual record and a body of research, a way of tracing the evolution of a practice from observing landscapes at a distance toward a more embodied engagement with land through labour and active stewardship.
STUDIO NXUMALO FIELD JOURNAL.
Studio Nxumalo FJ is an ongoing audio-visual field journal documenting the people, labour and landscapes encountered through the Studio’s practice. This segment of the project moves between observation and participation, with Labour as Research at its centre, an evolving study of land stewardship through sustained, hands-on engagement.
Labour is central to Studio Nxumalo’s exploration of regenerative landscapes and stewardship. This process begins not at Waaipoort Farm, but in earlier deliberate encounters with natural landscapes at Kliprivier and Clarens Nature Reserve, where dedicated walks and hikes served as a method of observation that informed the photographic approach and engagement with nature.
These first experiences were characterised by distant observation without participation: moving through terrain, reading surfaces, framing views, and attempting to understand organic systems through looking alone. Over time, this mode of observation revealed its own limitations. The act of witnessing without a holistic connection; physical, spiritual and emotional, began to feel incomplete, as if the landscape could not be fully understood through vision and documentation alone.
This led to a shift toward labour as a necessary extension of observation. At Waaipoort Farm, Nxumalo learns to pay close attention to the everyday work required to inhabit, maintain and care for a landscape: clearing grass, repairing fences, tending vegetables, working with animals, moving materials, preparing soil, repairing infrastructure and learning the rhythms of the seasons.
These tasks are often ordinary and repetitive, but they reveal something fundamental about land stewardship: that the landscape is not only a place we occupy and nourish from, but a place we learn to read, respond to and take responsibility for in a more embodied and holistic way. In this instance, labour becomes a way of making sense of the ecology, particularly organic matter, through direct engagement rather than observation alone.
Therefore, Labour is both subject and method. The camera follows the work as it happens, documenting the tools, techniques, mistakes, adaptations and accumulated knowledge that emerge through doing. As the project develops beyond Waaipoort, these observations will extend into different landscapes, communities and forms of stewardship, connecting everyday labour to the larger question at the centre of Studio Nxumalo: How do people choose to inhabit, work with, and assume responsibility for the land?
SELECTED AWARDS AND RECOGNITIONS
2008: Edward Ruiz Mentorship Award, Johannesburg, South Africa.
2009: MTN CIT:Y Awards, 2nd Prize – Visual Art Category, Johannesburg, South Africa.
2010: ImpACT Award, 1st Prize – Visual Art Category, The Arts & Culture Trust, South Africa.
2010: Mail & Guardian 200 Young South Africans.
2011: Joop Swart Masterclass Nominee, World Press Photo, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
2012: Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund Nominee, New York City, USA.
2015: First Book Award – Finalist, London, UK.
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2009: Alternative-Kidz [Travelling Exhibition], Market Photo Workshop Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa.
2009: Alternative-Kidz [Travelling Exhibition], National School of Arts, Johannesburg, South Africa.
2009: Alternative-Kidz [Travelling Exhibition], Stevenson Gallery (Side Gallery Project), Cape Town, South Africa.
2011: Musa Nxumalo, Afronova Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa.
2015: In Search Of…, Goethe-Institut, Johannesburg, South Africa.
2017: 16 Shots, SMAC Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa.
2020: We Are Running Out of Hashtags!, SMAC Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa.
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2010: …For Those Who Live In It, Mu Project Space, Eindhoven, Netherlands.
2011: The Night Show, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa.
2012: Shoe Shop Project, Goethe-Institut, Johannesburg, South Africa.
2013: My Joburg, Maison Rouge Gallery, Paris, France.
2013: Urban Scenographies, By Night Festival, Réunion Island.
2013: Space Between Us, ifa-Galerie, Berlin, Germany.
2013: Shoot to Kill, Kalashnikov Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa.
2014: Short Change, Market Photo Workshop Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa.
2014: Peregrinate, FNB Joburg Art Fair (Goethe-Institut), Sandton Convention Centre, Johannesburg, South Africa.
2015: On Fire: Notions of Community in Post-Apartheid South Africa, curated by Manuel Osterholt, Grimmuseum, Berlin, Germany.
2015: Peregrinate [Travelling Exhibition], Goethe-Institut, Côte d’Ivoire.
2015: Next Generation: Emerging Photographers from South Africa, Queens College, New York City, USA.
2016: Close to Home: New Photography from Africa, The Walther Collection – Project Space, New York City, USA.
2016: Peregrinate [Travelling Exhibition], Goethe-Institut, Nairobi, Kenya.
2016: Peregrinate [Travelling Exhibition], Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Lagos, Nigeria.
2017: Platform Africa, Aperture Summer Issue Launch, 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair, New York City, USA.
2017: Être là, South Africa: A Contemporary Art Scene, Art/Afrique, le nouvel atelier, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France.
2017: Peregrinate [Travelling Exhibition], Goethe-Institut, Yaoundé, Cameroon.
2017: Peregrinate [Travelling Exhibition], Goethe-Institut, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo.
2018: Night Fever: Designing Club Culture 1960–Today, ADAM – Brussels Design Museum, Brussels, Belgium.
2019: Crossing Night: Regional Identities × Global Context, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit, USA.
2019: Africa State of Mind [Travelling Exhibition], Impressions Gallery, Bradford, UK.
2019: Africa State of Mind [Travelling Exhibition], Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, USA.
2019: Africa State of Mind [Travelling Exhibition], Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, UK.
2019: Night Fever: Designing Club Culture 1960–Today, ADAM – Brussels Design Museum, Brussels, Belgium.
2020: NIRIN – 22nd Biennale of Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales.
2020: NIRIN – 22nd Biennale of Sydney, Artspace.
2020: NIRIN – 22nd Biennale of Sydney, Campbelltown Arts Centre.
2020: NIRIN – 22nd Biennale of Sydney, Cockatoo Island.
2020: NIRIN – 22nd Biennale of Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.
2020: NIRIN – 22nd Biennale of Sydney, National Art School, Sydney, Australia.
SELECTED COMMISSIONS
2013–2014: Roodepoort Exhibition Project, Public Affairs Research Institute, South Africa.
2014: Atlantic Philanthropies Project, Magnum Foundation, New York City, USA.
SELECTED COLLECTIONS
Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa.
The Silo Hotel Collection, Cape Town, South Africa.
Pigozzi Collection, Geneva, Switzerland.
Genop Collection, Johannesburg, South Africa.
Leridon Collection, Paris, France.
Cloud Seven, Brussels, Belgium.
Several private collections.
SELECTED PRESS.