Abongile Sidzumo was born in 1996 in Cape Town, where he currently lives and works. He completed his degree in Fine Arts at the Michaelis School of Fine Arts in 2019.

Sidzumo works with leather offcuts and repurposed materials to create works that reflect and interrogate humanity, the way we co-exist and our relationship with nature; he revisits memories and connects them to spaces he has lived in as well as the everyday life of marginalised communities.

Leather is often associated with luxury, wealth and power. Through his process of restitching and weaving this precious material, Sidzumo proposes that we start thinking about repurposed materials in a different way. Connecting it to notions of trauma that has been inflicted on black communities during apartheid, his practice also functions as a manner of interrogating the continuous healing of black communities in post-apartheid South Africa.

Sidzumo received the Blessing Ngobeni Art Prize, which afforded him a solo exhibition entitled Dancing in the Dust at Everard Read Gallery in Johannesburg in 2020. In the same year, he was the runner-up for the Cassirer Welz Award, hosted by Strauss & Co Auctioneers.

Sidzumo has participated in numerous group exhibitions: The Oasis at Hallmark House (2021), A Prelude at BKhz Gallery and Slip stream at Gallery-De-Move-On (2022), to name a few. In 2021, Sidzumo received the Absa L’Atelier Gerald Sekoto Award. The Award won him a three-month residency at Cité International des Arts, in Paris, France . In 2023 Sidzumo had his second solo show at Absa gallery in Johannesburg, which also travelled to Gqeberha, Bloemfontein and Pretoria.
In 2023 he was the artist in residence at KNKK. His work was recently shown at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair by Osart Gallery.

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2021
'Amagoduka', Absa Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa

2020
‘Dancing In The Dust’, Everard Read, Johannesburg, South Africa

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2024
'A Very Loop Street Summer III', Cape Town, South Africa
'Waste', The Breakroom, Cape Town, South Africa
'An Abstract Exhibition', BKhz Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa
'...as we see it', EBONY/CURATED, Cape Town, South Africa

2023
'Locating Identity', 16 ON LEROTHOLI, Cape Town, South Africa

2022
'Harmony in Diversity', 16 ON LEROTHOLI, Cape Town, South Africa

2021
‘A Very Loop Street Summer’, EBONY/CURATED, Cape Town, South Africa
‘A CLOUD’, Gallery 2, Johannesburg, South Africa
‘Dikapa’, Jaffer Modern, Cape Town, South Africa
Turbine Art Fair, Studio Nxumalo, Johannesburg, South Africa
‘Currency’, Greatmore Studios, Cape Town, South Africa
‘The Oasis’, The Hallmark House, Johannesburg, South Africa

2020
‘We’ve Come To Take You Home’, Michaelis Galleries, Cape Town, South Africa