1 OCT 2021 - 30 SEP 2022
The Bag Factory is delighted to announce that Princia Matungulu and Kutlwano Monyai have been selected as joint recipients of the annual Young Womxn Studio Bursary, funded by Bag Factory alumni artist Sam Nhlengethwa. They will share a fully funded studio bursary at the Bag Factory for twelve months from 01 October 2021 to 30 September 2022.
Impressed with both artists’ work and noting how well the previous winners, Cheriese Dilrajh and Hemali Khoosal, worked as co-recipients, we decided to repeat the offer for the bursary to two promising womxn artists for another year.
Princia’s practice is a combination of weaving, sculpture and storytelling; whereby the approach towards the materiality, the intricacy of the weaving process and the resulting sculpture bears record of a personal, inferred or imagined history. Princia employs weaving processes as a form of silent protest — a means of understanding Congolese traditions, norms and values of ‘proper’ womanhood, which sometimes overlap and intersect with those of women from the African diaspora.
Princia Matungulu, born in 1999 in Lubumbashi, DR Congo, is a Johannesburg based artist currently completing her degree in Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. As a Congolese immigrant navigating through the South African landscape, she draws from her background and identity. Her series of work, Nouveaux Mémoire Vieux Pagne, 2020 (New Memory Old Cloth) was part of Archive of Forgetfulness’ group exhibition. She has been part of the Cosmosis exhibition at The Holy Art Gallery in London, UK and has also recently been a finalist and participant of the Wits Young Artist Award 2021.