Mosa Anita Kaiser on memory, fragmentation, and reclaiming the body as a living archive
29 July 2026
In ‘Residues of Proximity: One Body, Many Parts’, South African artist Mosa Anita Kaiser approaches the body as more than a physical form. It becomes an archive of memory, a repository of violence and care, and a site where histories of belonging, rupture, and repair continue to unfold. Developed through the Bag Factory Artists’ Studios’ Young/Unframed 2026 programme and curated by Melusi Masike, the exhibition weaves together painting, sculpture, photography, and printmaking to examine the body’s capacity to carry both personal and collective experience. In this conversation, Kaiser reflects on the symbolic language of mannequins, the idea of internal exile, the poetics of everyday objects, and why repair is less about returning to what was than imagining new forms of wholeness.
Brendon Bell-Roberts: ‘Residues of Proximity: One Body, Many Parts’ treats the body as both an archive and a site of seeing. What first drew you to the body as something that stores history rather than simply inhabits it?
Mosa Anita Kaiser: The contentious relationship that we can have with our body has always fascinated me. I think it’s inescapable and universal, which makes it something very rich to dig into. In all my digging, I’ve gone down many rabbit holes. For this one, I found it interesting how history seems almost malleable when I consider how it can be stored in our bodies. I feel like our histories, our pasts, personal and political, take different shapes depending on how we hold them. ‘Inhabiting history’ can imply that it’s a static space with an inbuilt authority. ‘Storing history in our bodies’ positions it as something more relational. Something I can own and speak back to as it speaks to me.
The exhibition introduces “internal exile” as a condition of cultural disjuncture and fractured belonging. How has this concept shaped your artistic language, and what experiences have informed its presence in the exhibition?
I encounter a lot of academic discourse and everyday conversation that point to a disconnect between how societies, cultures, and communities perceive a body, and how a person experiences their own body. Because of how loud these conversations are, I am acutely aware that I have to constantly negotiate nuanced perceptions when depicting and speaking of ‘the body’. My use of mannequins as a motif becomes useful here. No blank template of ‘the body’ really exists, but a mannequin has a unique distance from the reality of flesh and bone while still being able to emotively connect to our images of ‘self’. The ‘mannequin graveyard ’, which is an installation in the exhibition, spoke to this. The installation featured a pile of dismembered mannequin parts on a bed of dirt. Still broken, scratched and chipped from their previous resting places where they were discarded and exposed to the elements. The ode to ‘disjuncture’ and ‘fracture’ is very literal and visceral. At the same time, it’s also layered in that it is a window into my artistic process. This is my medium; these are my tools, in their most raw form before any poetic artistic intervention that continues the conversation. I think of internal exile as being physically and mechanically present, while emotionally and functionally displaced beyond comfort.
Your work moves across photography, painting, printmaking, and sculpture. How do these mediums let you explore fragmentation, repair, and memory in ways a single medium could not?
In my practice, I prefer to start with the idea, the story or the message and then, from there, consider which medium painting, sculpture, etc. would best suit what I’m trying to communicate. Some ideas just WANT to be a painting. There’s something transcendental about creation, and I try to stay attuned to that. You can’t give birth and then dictate what will come out; the new thing takes its own shape in the way it was ordained to be. That’s speaking on a spiritual level. But also, there is the practical level: I am interested in many things. New processes, techniques and ways that I can challenge and manipulate any medium to incite something different. Painting allows me to linger slowly with emotion. Sculpture lets the body occupy real space, making fragmentation tangible, and photography often becomes a way of collecting evidence and beginning my research process. Printmaking allows repetition and layering that mirrors memory itself.
Mannequins recur throughout your practice as stand-ins for the objectified body. What continues to draw you to this form, and how has its meaning evolved in ‘Residues of Proximity: One Body, Many Parts’?
In working with mannequins over the years, I’ve formed a growing collection of limbs and torsos and heads. Not having a permanent studio has meant that these bodies have woven into my home and subsequently my daily life. When I invite people over, there might be a mannequin torso standing like a sentinel by my front door; when I reach for a book on my bookshelf, there might be a mannequin hand propping it up. I’ve even found some loose fingers in my laundry basket. In this time, these mannequins have become their own characters to me, and my relationship to them has increased in impact. I have an alter ego called ‘The Handler’ to acknowledge that there is significance in having someone collect these discarded pieces and put them back together again. There’s a new life that a mannequin leg can have when placed in my garden and finding purpose propping up a tree’s branch. Being a part of the Young/Unframed 2026 programme has allowed me to really illustrate and immerse the viewer in this relationship by recreating an imagined fantasy of a domestic space where mannequins really take centre stage as part of a home’s interior. This, of course, also opens up even further metaphors and room for poetic exploration. The rabbit holes are endless.
Everyday motifs appear throughout the exhibition, transforming ordinary objects and gestures into carriers of memory and emotion. What interests you about the poetic potential of the everyday, and how do these forms become sites of cultural retrieval?
My work really isn’t interested in highlighting any specific big canon events, or going into the details of my own life, or the shared lives of the spaces I inhabit. This is very intentional. When it comes to my own body and the people close to me, it is the subtle influence of the small violences and subtle questions that I find interesting to observe. I am fascinated by how these things can silently accumulate. Tiny monsters that we don’t acknowledge until they manifest as bigger beasts. Also, I just love the literary power of a symbolic motif that comes in the form of an everyday object. As a narrative device, there is already a story built in it. And to subvert it invites the hibernating mundane to wake up. Two feet on a bedroom pillow invite you to ask strange questions. I’m always excited when my work triggers a ‘why’. Cultural retrieval is the consideration of what informs the relationship to the object. There is so much that comes from the conversations and engagements.
The exhibition refuses the historical positioning of the body as spectacle or object, instead presenting it as a living repository of desire, grief, resilience, and hope. What does it mean to reclaim the body on these terms in the contemporary South African context?
I feel that things like desire, grief, resilience and hope are always searching for some type of repository in our contemporary South African landscapes. The complexity of the tragedies of our country leaves us with the yearning for something to hold onto. In my experience, intuition has been so disturbed by contemporary culture that where we would normally go for reprieve is now second-guessed. I like to believe that our own bodies were always intended as safe and sacred spaces. Rest is accessible through the mechanisms that the body already inherently provides. It can sound fanciful or over-idealistic, but something like just breathing and controlling your breath can unlock your mind and muscle capabilities in ways that actually have a significant influence on your waking reality. This reclamation of the body’s capabilities, power and position, I hope, will be significant in a deeper awareness of how we steward our bodies – especially in relationship to an external and inescapable insistence on its objectification.
Your practice often navigates the tension between violence and wholeness, absence and repair. Do you see repair as achievable, or as an ongoing negotiation of what has been lost, remembered, and reimagined?
Is repair achievable? In some senses, I have to believe the answer is yes, or else the pursuit of it becomes futile. In another sense, I also have to consider the definition of repair as something fluid while in this active pursuit. If I think about healing, which I often use as a synonym for repair, the process becomes something that acknowledges that we might not return fully to what we were, but we still do become whole and functional again. Scars are part of healing, and so brokenness can become part of repair. When considering the body as a living thing, finite in its physical composition, made up of tangible pieces, I think we repair by reimagining the sum of our parts differently. Absence and loss can take on subversive understandings and remembering can be a ritual that summons new realities.
Developed through the Young/Unframed programme and in dialogue with curator Melusi Masike, this exhibition reflects close exchange between artistic and curatorial thinking. How did that collaboration expand or challenge your understanding of the work as it took shape?
This was my first time working so closely with a curator inside the structure of an institutional framework like a residency. The first point of interest was how I, as an artist, could condense and translate my practice into their fresh hands. Because my work has so many different touchpoints, I had to carefully prioritise what was most essential. This made me really have to sit with my work in ways I haven’t done in a long time. It’s also thought-provoking that the curator has to be almost as invested in my work as I am when working together to produce the exhibition. A vibrant energy was ignited, which is very different to the solace of the initial thinking and drafting of the artworks. Taken together, these experiences made me consider what the entire body of work means to others that might not come from any of my direct intentions. And in contrast, it was also a good environment to witness what ideas carry through like threads without even being spoken.
Melusi Masike (Curator): With this collaboration, I was thinking of two things: apprenticeship and form. Apprenticeship as a form of Umkhaphi ( to accompany someone), being in the journey with the artist and their works, allowing the work to be the anchor of my curatorial language. This journey of apprenticeship informed how I listened to the artist and the works; this, however, challenged my ideas of racial configurations that the body is exposed to, and it allowed me to draw on ideas of materiality as a performative language that informed the curatorial form. And form in this instance looks at what remains when bodies are removed, and the assumed labels it gets attached to. The form of this exhibition was trying to create distance between bodies and the spaces they occupy. At its core, the exhibition interrogates the historical construction of the body as a site of spectacle, consumption, and amusement. Yet the body presented here refuses these conditions. In that regard, lighting and the construction of the house shaped how we created ambience through sonic intervention and creating friction between sculptures, video and paintings.
This exhibition was on view on the Second Floor of the KingKong Building, 8 Verwey Street, Troyeville, from 18 June until 9 July 2026.
