Witsie wins 2025 Standard Bank Young Artist Award
- Wits Alumni Relations
Nyakallo Maleke joins a long list of alumni winners in the visual arts category.
Nyakallo Maleke (BA FA 2016) has been announced as the winner of the 2025 Standard Bank Young Artist Award in the Visual Arts category.
The 32-year-old artist says the acknowledgement came as a complete surprise. “I did not anticipate it at all,” but it has been a huge confidence boost.
“At a time when things are happening instantly, even my artistic practice has gone through multiple evolutions of re-adjusting and re-adapting. I think the award is a sign to keep trusting the imagination to build, create and mould knowledge and alternative worlds. To trust how my hands want to articulate that knowledge or moment,” she says.
Established by the National Arts festival in 1981, the awards recognise artists under the age of 35 across various disciplines including music, visual arts, spoken word, jazz, theatre, dance, and performance art. It is considered one of the most prestigious acknowledgements for artists who have demonstrated “exceptional ability in their chosen field.”
Maleke holds a master’s degree from édhéa, a university in Sierre, Switzerland and is currently reading towards a master’s in creative writing at the University of the Western Cape. She will be working towards a solo presentation as part of the prize at the National Arts Festival in Makhanda later in June.
The National Arts Festival Artistic committee says Maleke's work “expands the conversation around drawing as both a medium and metaphor” and that her drawings are “journeys in and of themselves — maps of migration, vulnerability and spatial memory”.
She describes her work as “experimental” and “intuitive”. “It is rooted in vulnerability which I try to communicate sincerely in material ways. My work or style is an ongoing moment of processing and making sense of the world,” she says.
“I have always been interested in working with found objects and materials, or everyday materials during my undergraduate studies at the Wits School of Arts. My practice always begins with materials that come from a home context — hot plate stoves, warm light bulbs, kettles and wax paper.
“Now, I am stitching, working with plastic from grocery stores, food packets and having them be in a tangible conversation with traditional art making materials like pastels, charcoal and watercolours. I enjoy wax paper for both its strength and fragility, it absorbs and rejects different materials that it comes into contact with and knows how to choreograph those range of textures on one surface in fluid ways.”
At Wits, Maleke was awarded the Heather Martienssen Prize (now the Wits Young Artist Award) in 2014 and she thinks back fondly about her time at the university: “A lot of my experimental and conceptual language started there and it brought a lot of grounding and time to think and explore what having a practice is.
“It allowed one to feel free because I did not confine my work to fit a category. My visual language was versatile. I was still figuring a lot of things out — who I was, and who I wanted to be. I really valued my undergraduate years because I was given space to play and understand my creative abilities across different conceptual and visual formats.
“I remember doing an installation on the beach volleyball courts that was one of the most freeing times of play and inquiry, and feeling really independent and curious. I also remember some of the interventions that I did at the substation and winning my first award.”
Maleke joins other Wits alumni winners in the same category including Buhlebezwe Siwani (BA FA 2012), Gabrielle Goliath (BA FA 2008) and Kemang Wa Lehulere (BA FA 2012) and William Kentridge (BA 1977, DLitt honoris causa 2004).