Meleko Mokgosi’s large-scale, figurative, and often text-based paintings explore concepts of colonialism, democracy, and freedom throughout African history. Mokgosi studies the numerous ways in which democracy is maintained and changes through time, focusing on the usually contradictory conceptions inherent in the concept and practise of democracy, such as the individual vs. the collective and intuitive vs. programmed behaviour.
By combining images of political and social propaganda, religious iconography, and advertisements from southern Africa and the United States to create layers of meaning that are both familiar and strange, Mokgosi transforms the norms of historical painting into works of grand scale and scope. Mokgosi reimagines the linkages between art history, postcolonial nationhood, and democracy within an interdisciplinary critical framework, emphasising the numerous ways in which Black people have turned into unattributed objects of empire and institution.