Cow Mash’s solo installation at Javett-UP reimagines lineage and indigenous knowledge systems through an immersive, intergenerational landscape of play, ritual and becoming.
Cow Mash ditšwatšhemong, profile. Image courtesy of the artist.
Tshwane-based artist Cow Mash presents ditšwatšhemong at Javett-UP, a solo installation whose title translates as “they come from the field” or “the origins of the land.” Situated in dialogue with Orchard of the Imagination, the exhibition draws on ideas of lineage, ancestry and belonging, approaching land as both a physical site and a spiritual archive shaped by memory and knowledge.
Mash’s practice moves fluidly across temporal registers, holding ancestral histories alongside speculative futures. In ditšwatšhemong, this temporal elasticity is foregrounded through an installation that imagines worlds in which indigenous knowledge systems and spiritual cosmologies persist, adapt and evolve. The work does not attempt to fix these systems in the past, but instead positions them as living, generative frameworks.
The exhibition unfolds as a carefully choreographed journey. It begins with masekitlana, an indigenous storytelling game rooted in oral tradition, and concludes with a familiar nursery rhyme reworked through Sepedi vowel sounds. These gestures frame the installation as an intergenerational space in which play becomes a mode of transmission and learning. Visitors enter through a reimagined street-language environment that echoes informal infrastructures, invoking the textures of everyday life and survival.
Beyond this threshold, the space opens into a quieter, more contemplative terrain. Unidentified seedlings are suspended in glass vessels, tended by the Balemi (farmers), suggesting both preservation and uncertainty. The act of care becomes central here, as fragile forms of knowledge are suspended. Nearby, a waskom containing migrating cows introduces a subtle sense of movement, marking cycles of displacement and return within an intimate register.
Detail view, Cow Mash, Give us this day our daily bread (Part 1), 2024, Corrugated planter, faux leather, resin. Image courtesy of the artist Cow Mash ditšwatšhemong.
At the core of the installation lies an inner, sacred space where waskoms and planters gather beneath an aerial view of tshemong. In this configuration, the viewer is invited to assume the role of the farmer, participating in a cultivation process that is at once material and symbolic. The space gestures toward origin while remaining open to transformation, a site of becoming rather than resolution.
For curator Puleng Plessie, Mash’s self-positioning as a “transdimensional farmer” speaks to this expanded understanding of cultivation. It is not only land that is tended, but also memory, ritual and imagined futures. Central to this is the recurring motif of the grandmother’s garden, understood here as a metaphorical site of abundance, healing and inherited knowledge.
Within the architectural context of the Javett-UP Tower, ditšwatšhemong offers an environment in which viewers are invited to reflect on their own relationships to land, memory and futurity, engaging a practice that insists on continuity across worlds and generations.
The exhibition is on at the Javett Centre for Art at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, from 24 March 2026.
