Vela Projects presents Iya embovaneni vila ndini, Songezo Zantsi's third solo exhibition with the gallery.

The title[Iya embovaneni vila ndini], drawn from a directive the artist carries from his grandfather, translates loosely as: “Take heed, you lazy fool, and witness the exemplary labour of the ants.”

For Zantsi, this saying has become an internal compass, one that has shifted from memory to action. “I’ve been carrying it over the years without me knowing,” he reflects. “But now, remembering it and finding myself acting on it, I think it’s another different thing. It was just me carrying the idea and bringing it into life. And then, like, it carrying me eventually, leading me or guiding me where I should go.”

This tension finds fullest expression in the larger works. Selimile (2026) offers a vision of growth, forms emerging from a misty ground as if just coming into focus,shoots pushing through soil, or perhaps the slow construction of a mound, indistinguishable from the earth that surrounds it. The pastel’s softness allows shapes to breathe and blur, refusing the finality of hard lines. Umnikelo (2026) speaks to the act of offering, a figure, or perhaps an anthill—centered in a landscape that feels both specific and archetypal. What is being offered? Labour, perhaps, or attention, or the simple willingness to stop and observe from a height that barely clears the ground.

Self-representation, for Zantsi, is a vital act of protest rooted in memory. “I think about remembering, I think that’s the starting point,” he explains. “Remembering such words I was raised with. So that was the starting point. Just remembering like, okay, this far, what has built me.”

Like Solomon Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa—a literary classic that captured the Ikholwa intellectual’s protest against disenfranchisement—Zantsi’s work reflects South African life through lived experience and memory. His debut solo exhibition, Iinkumbulo (2023), breathed life into the remembrance of the Bisho Massacre, establishing his practice as one of historical recovery.

In Uhambo (2026), the journey becomes visible, figures moving through terrain that blurs the line between earth and sky. There is no clear path here, only the suggestion of one, a trail that ants would know but humans might miss, marked by nothing more than the subtle compression of grass or the turn of a stone. The monumental Umkhondo (2026) suggests a path, the imprint left by those who walked before, a trace that becomes architecture when enough bodies follow it. From an ant’s point of view, this imprint is not a scar on the land but a kind of memory made solid, a collective history pressed into the ground.

For this new body of work, Zantsi has turned his gaze outward, following his grandfather’s directive to observe the world from a different vantage point, the ant’s point of view. “So by me experimenting,” he explains, “I tried to do a bit of research on how this saying or how significant ants are coexisting with humans.” His goal was to translate the saying into a visual language anyone could understand, yet he was careful not to be literal. “So as a figurative painter, I wanted to merge the two, the landscape and the figurative.”

And in Phantsi komthunzi (2026), beneath the shade, Zantsi offers a space of respite, the anthill’s promise of collective labour balanced by the wisdom of rest. Here, the work pauses. The heat of the day recedes. Figures, or mounds, or both, settle into the cool of shadow, and the viewer understands that the anthill is not only a site of endless toil but also a home, a shelter, a place where the labour of remembering is allowed to stop, if only for a moment.

The result is a series of works that feel discovered rather than composed. Zantsi’s process began with imagining terrain to gather a figurative vocabulary of earth, light, and shadow. From these imaginations, he builds paintings that are less about a particular landscape than about the sensation of being low to the ground, of seeing the world from below.

These works are not illustrations of a saying but explorations of a way of seeing. Zantsi describes his process as following the directive: “That is why I decided to implement that in my practice, to take the step to go outside, and create images that speak to me and what I want to expand the conversation on.” The paintings draw from figurative conceptualization, but they transcend their sources, becoming imagined terrains that exist only in the space between memory, observation, and

paint.

In Laku tshona ilanga (2026), Zantsi captures sunset as a quiet receding, the horizon line almost imperceptible, as if viewed through grass or from the lip of an anthill. The sky withdraws slowly, its warmth bleeding into the earth rather than vanishing above it. From this low vantage point, the world is measured in increments of dirt, shadow, and the shifting weight of light.

What emerges is a body of work that complicates grand narratives by zooming in on peripheralised perspectives,the ant’s view, the overlooked ground, the haziness of recollection. In this, he continues the labour his grandfather invoked: the patient, collective work of the anthill, building memory one brushstroke at a time.The smaller meditative panels, Vela Langa (2026) and Ukuzithuma (2026), function as expressive observations of light and earth, intimate formats observed by the kind of