Quick Facts:

I am Puleng Mongale, a visual artist living and working in Durban, South Africa. My professional artistic career began in 2019 with self-portraits and digital collages. 

My artistic expression is mainly influenced by the stories of the women in my life; women who raised meand women in my family who I have heard about but never met- such as my late great-grandmother who I am named after. I also draw inspiration from the black, working-class women I encounter daily in the city, and everywhere I go. My digital collage work is an exploration of my identity and spirituality through an internal dialogue that revolves around remembrance, the establishment and maintenance of ancestral relationships, and black womanhood. I constantly feel like I am existing in more than one temporality, the physical and the intangible, and my work allows me to be present and show up in both. 

My work is about taking a chance at creating myself. It is about saying I am here, and this is who I am to the world instead of being dictated to by my geographical and political positioning. Being a young black woman in South Africa, born into a world where I mostly feel unseen and unheard, art is a political and spiritual exercise for me. I use it to practice my resistance, agency, and faith, and generally to take my power back. It’s how I define myself in a world that says I shouldn’t exist. Overall, self-portraiture is my first love.

In 2022, I participated in the Abadali Art Programme, a JP Morgan initiative. Each of the 10 nominated artists was paired with a mentor and tasked with creating a work to be included in JP Morgan's New York private gallery. In 2021, I collaborated with artist Cinthia Sifa Mulanga on a print project in partnership with Jill Ross Print and Latitudes. In 2020, I worked as one of 8 artists with L'MAD X Latitudes on Made it to the life raft, a summer collection of silk scarves.