Mapping memory, belonging

Collages crafted by 2025 FNB Art Prize winner Thato Toeba confront colonial legacies and celebrate African intimacy and connection

- Lesego Chepape

When I first spoke to Thato Toeba, I was struck not only by their clarity of thought but by the calm resolve with which they inhabit multiple worlds — those of art and law, of memory and material, of Lesotho and Amsterdam and of the spiritual and the political.

It’s no wonder then that the jury of the 2025 FNB Art Prize described their practice as “a quiet force”, praising the maturity of their collage and assemblage work.

Though they only recently emerged onto the visual arts scene, Toeba’s voice is already unmistakable — deeply philosophical, political and informed by the contradictions of life in the Global South.

They are part of a rising generation of artists from the African continent who are not only creating new visual languages, but also interrogating the systems that shape our histories, bodies and beliefs.

Born and brought up in Maseru, Lesotho, Toeba’s journey into art was anything but linear. Their academic path initially led them into the world of law and social science, where they trained as an advocate and wrote a PhD on corruption and legal structures.

Their legal thinking — analytical, structured, yet deeply concerned with justice, has remained central to how they now navigate visual storytelling.

“Law sensitised me to the world,” they told me during our conversation, “not just as a profession, but as a way of seeing.”

It wasn’t until 2023 that Toeba held their first solo exhibition, Phate lia Lekana, a Sesotho phrase that loosely translates to “when you lie down, the earth beneath you equals the sky above you”.

It served as both metaphor and motif for their show, a meditation on duality, double consciousness and the space between the natural and the political.

Their use of collage, meticulously arranged archival photographs, personal family images and religious iconography, invites the viewer to read rather than simply look.