Ora Loapi showcases Lesejane, Motoloki's works in SA
correspondent | Sunday November 9, 2025 12:22
The curatorial direction of the G20 show foregrounds plurality over proxy, resisting the idea that any one voice can stand in for a continent, and champions artistic self-authorship as cultural agency. Botswana’s contribution advances this position through two distinct but consonant practices: Pako Lesejane materially-sensitive photography and Totang Motoloki meditative mixed-media works. Lesejane works with landscape as archive and atmosphere. His photographs are not endpoints but beginnings—surfaces patiently built through process, where light, dust, and time are allowed to speak. Through tactile interventions and restrained compositional choices, the images become palimpsests that hold ecological memory and human passage in the same frame. The result is a poetics of attention: a slowed way of looking that honours continuity, care, and the quiet power of place. Motoloki, by contrast, maps interior terrains.
His canvases braid colour, line, and motif into layered fields where memory, feeling, and contemporary life are held in delicate tension. Moving between abstraction and sign, his language is intimate without spectacle, attuned to the small temperatures of daily experience and the dignity of the seen and half-seen. These works do not illustrate identity; they stage it as a lived, evolving texture.
Together, Lesejane and Motoloki articulate complementary coordinates for the exhibition’s ethos. One traces the outer geographies that shape us; the other, the inner weather we carry. One teaches us to listen to land; the other, to the cadence of interior life. Their shared commitment to material nuance and ethical looking offers a counterpoint to flattening narratives, modelling how specificity becomes a form of sovereignty. In bringing Botswana’s distinct sensibilities to a Pan-African conversation, the pairing amplifies the show’s core proposition: that Africa’s cultural power lies not in a single story, but in the precise, plural worlds its artists make visible.