What makes it particularly extraordinary is not that he is the only one from Africa among the 24 student-artists taking part in this gathering of the Tropical Lab at Labelle Art Centre at Singapore University of the Arts, but that this is Gigaba’s ninth international residency.
The reason for this proliferation is equally unexpected. It has almost nothing to do with the fact that Gigaba enjoys travelling.
What kickstarted these residencies was the desire and urgency to educate himself. He was registered at a university to do his master’s in fine art but through a series of unfortunate events, including the death and the resignation of lecturers, he had no supervisor. “I resorted to doing residencies,” he says.
“I went to university as a practising artist to enhance my skills. I felt I had a contribution to make and that I belonged to the global community. I had tried a number of things locally, like exhibitions but”, he says, using one of his favourite expressions,“ I felt like I should take a risk”. So he set off to explore what people were doing elsewhere “so I can learn from them, and also they can learn from me”.
The university he was at the time awarded him the Emma Smith Fellowship and he did his first residency at Illinois States University in the US. That was in 2012. Since then he has had residencies in Italy, Egypt, Mexico, Serbia and three in China. Gigaba is multifaceted and multi-talented, and the focus of these residencies range from ceramics to printmaking.
With his forthcoming two-week one in mid-July, he is even toying with combining the two mediums. The theme of the 20th edition of the Tropical Lab in Singapore is “terra”, as in terra firma or earth, and so lends itself to clay sculptures for the closing exhibition but, says Gigaba, “I might improvise and do something with printing as well. We'll see how things go”.
Gigaba has the playfulness associated with a creative artist but also takes residencies very seriously. Apart from looking forward to seeing Singaporean architecture – buildings and constructions are a passion and he first started studying civil engineering – the trip is not about sightseeing. He views it as being an ambassador for Nelson Mandela University.
”I am always looking for opportunities for students. The experience is likely to inform my teaching on project planning, creative sustainability and the practical realities of building an art practice. Insights gained abroad may later be shared as examples of how artistic development and enterprise can intersect,” says Gigaba, who lectures third-year Mandela University students on art entrepreneurship.
He thinks of it as providing a starter pack to create a business. “People should start thinking of different ways of using creativity outside of their discipline. We don’t want to have struggling artists,” he says.
To Gigaba, artmaking is an important endeavour. He is motivated by transforming language into art. “Words create forms, they create images. So it's a matter of putting out what we speak and then trying to archive it in a different light - archiving it through art making. I use clay like a metaphor, exploring language and archiving, as clay has been used for many years –that's how we've been able to trace civilisations and cultures and traditions.”
His master’s degree, which he ended up doing at the University of Johannesburg - and with which he graduated in 2018 with distinction and earned membership of the Golden Key International Honour Society for being in the top 15% of his class - looked at two South African artists, Nandipha Mntambo and Colbert Mashile, in terms of anthropomorphism (ascribing human traits to animal characters) and therianthropism (part human and part animal).
He says these terms “compress meaning but are relatable once we unpack them” yet what makes the rest of Gigaba’s academic output so distinctive is his use of colloquial language, mostly isiZulu.
His master’s exhibition was titled Ntwananhle and the R2 Boys, using both his clan praise name, in deference to his ancestors, and the slang description “two-rand boys” for the unemployed men who would ask for a R2 donation. (He says it has since gone up to a R10 Tiger).
Similarly, his PhD topic refers to deconstructing the “Lamthuthu Complex”, slang for white, bland battery chickens, or weaklings, which he uses to refer to the relationship between the Killie Campbell Collections House Museum and KwaMashu, where he grew up.
He articulates about this use of language in his master’s thesis: “I often use vernacular titles in my work to guide the viewer in unpacking the story, and this opens my work to multiple cultural interpretations,” he states in its introduction.
Gibaba joined Nelson Mandela University in October 2024 as part of the New Generation of Academics Programme (nGAP), a government initiative to recruit highly talented scholars to become academics. He acknowledges the responsibility and says he is “privileged to be doing my PhD and lecturing”.
He is determined to be in academia because “government has invested a lot of money in this nGAP programme” and “I feel I have to assist” and “to be the change that I wanted to see”. Yet he is not immune to the idea of going back to being an artist one day and playing his music (he is also a DJ) and “taking advantage of my friends around the world and going on other residences”.
His art has most recently been seen at the 2023 Tokyo Biennale, for which he designed a traditional Japanese oshibori hand towel, and at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics International Printmaking Exhibition. He is featured in museum collections around the world, from the US to Serbia and China.
An exhibition of telephone wire art from South Africa titled Ingqikithi Yokuphica/Weaving Meanings at the Museum of International Folk Art in New Mexico, which he co-curated with Dr Elizabeth Perrill, a Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina in Greenboro in the US, will be touring America from next year.
He is aware of his strong international profile but is determined to stay close to his roots. “I'm not fully happy about having my work in sculpture parks abroad without making an input in South Africa.
That's why I started Hlonipha Ulimi Lwakho/Mind Your Language (which investigates the development of home languages through producing art), consciously creating impacts in the communities which I come from, and teaching at the university,” says Gigaba.