Curatorial Statement of My Cup Runneth Over solo exhibition by Bongi Bengu

My Cup Runneth Over solo exhibition by Bongi Bengu

Text by Chepape Makgato, chief curator at William Humphreys Art Gallery, 20 May 2025.

Bongi Bengu’s My Cup Runneth Over is a culmination of more than three decades of artistic practice—a sustained period of introspection, transformation, and visual storytelling that traverses the terrains of identity, spirituality, memory, and womanhood. Bengu’s own words set the tone: “This exhibition is a celebration of a journey—over thirty years of creation, exploration, and becoming.” But beyond celebration, the exhibition functions as supplication—a calling forth of spirits, stories, sensations, and selves. It is a gathering of visual, emotional, and ancestral fragments that form a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Through this body of work, Bengu does not merely trace her own becoming; she opens a space for viewers to reckon with the textures of their own emotional and cultural inheritances.

At the heart of My Cup Runneth Over lies the act of remembering—personal, political, and spiritual. The exhibition is not presented as a chronological retrospective but as a curated cosmos of visual language. Across ceramics, collage, found objects, leaves, tree bark, soil, and mortar, Bengu constructs a tactile vocabulary that speaks to the earthiness of being and the ethereality of spirit. These materials do not serve a merely aesthetic function but a great self-retrospection. The materials are are storied, lived, and symbolic, drawing from the ecological, the ancestral, and the mundane. Bengu’s assemblages operate as what scholar Tina Campt might describe as “quiet” images—rich with affect, resonant with ancestral frequencies, yet speaking in subtle, layered tones that ask for contemplative attention. What unfolds in this open-themed exhibition is a gathering of everyday figures—ordinary people rendered with such familiarity and emotional truth that one cannot help but wonder, Where have I seen them before? They seem to resonate deeply with the recesses of one’s memory, like echoes from a lived experience or fragments from dreams and moments past, etched quietly onto the subconscious.

Weaving Memory: Material as Metaphor

The exhibition positions materiality not as medium alone, but as a metaphor. In Bengu’s hands, art becomes a form of weaving—threads of history, memory, and feeling looped into a tapestry that honours Black South African womanhood and the often-unseen spiritual labour of survival. Leaves, bark, and soil—materials that decay and regenerate—speak to cycles of life, loss, and renewal. Collage, with its layered fragments, evokes the process of reassembling shattered or scattered selves, of finding cohesion in the midst of rupture.

The spectral presence of Sarah Baartman reverberates throughout Bongi Bengu’s work—not through overt visual likeness, but through subtle allusion and symbolic resonance. Her legacy is evoked with quiet dignity in one of the exhibition’s large-scale pieces rendered in mortar and layered in melancholic hues of blue and violet. The chromatic choices suggest mourning and memory, while the earthen material of mortar calls forth a connection to land, body, and dispossession. Baartman’s story—one of objectification, exile, and ultimately reclamation—haunts the work as an unspoken narrative, woven into its very texture. Rather than reproducing her image, Bengu invokes her presence through atmosphere and materiality, allowing the viewer to sense Baartman’s enduring relevance in the broader discourse of Black womanhood, embodiment, and historical violence.

One of the most poignant works in the exhibition is a tribute to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, created in 2018, in the wake of her passing. Inspired by a photograph of a young Winnie, Bengu transforms an icon too often reduced to political shorthand into a textured subject of reverence and remembrance. The work resists hagiography, offering instead a layered meditation on youth, resistance, beauty, and fire. Collage here becomes not just a method but a political gesture—a reconstitution of a Black woman’s legacy beyond the confines of media reductionism. The piece pulses with a sense of deep respect, historical reckoning, and feminine solidarity, embedding Winnie Mandela within a broader genealogy of strength and vulnerability that fastens Bengu’s visual language.

Self-Portraiture and the Gendered Politics of Presence

Bengu’s consistent engagement with self-portraiture further enriches the thematic depth of the exhibition. These self-representations are not exercises in self-aggrandisement but acts of radical self-inscription. In a world that has historically rendered Black women invisible, or visible only through caricature and stereotype, Bengu’s insistence on placing her own face, body, and essence into the frame is an assertion of presence, a declaration that I was here—as artist, as woman, as witness.

In the work Lost In The Blues, a soft-pastel, charcoal and mixed media piece on paper, Bengu explores the nuanced emotional landscapes of intimacy and alienation. The composition features a bride in a red-flowered white wedding dress, her expression solemn, her gaze fixed with an intensity that seems to cut through the surface of the paper. Opposite her stands a groom, whose presence, while rendered, feels emotionally distant, his gaze unfocused, his role uncertain. Between them, a bass guitar anchors the emotional rift—a symbolic nod to the melancholic space of “the blues,” a sonic form born of longing, displacement, and desire. The instrument becomes a metaphor for unsaid things, for the music of disappointment that undergirds what should be celebration.

Through such imagery, Bengu reveals the often-unspoken emotional toll of womanhood, particularly in the performative scripts of marriage and domesticity. The bride’s gaze is emblematic of what bell hooks, in The Oppositional Gaze, calls a “rebellious looking.” During slavery, enslaved people—particularly women—were punished for looking directly at their captors. The gaze thus became not just a tool of vision, but of resistance (hook 1992). In Bengu’s work, eyes do not simply see; they challenge, they question, they declare I am looking back.

The Watching Eye: Metaphysical Portal and Political Gesture

The motif of the eye recurs throughout Bengu’s oeuvre. It appears not only in figurative depictions but in the very structure of her compositions, which often frame the viewer within an implied mutual gaze. The eye in Bengu’s work becomes a portal between worlds—the seen and the unseen, the self and the other, the artist and the audience. But it is also a form of spiritual surveillance; a watching not of control, but of witness. It is as if her figures—particularly the women—carry within them the eyes of ancestors, of histories, of generations who endured, and are now watching to see what we will do with our freedom, our memory, our truth.

This metaphysical function of the eye connects with broader African cosmologies in which seeing is not passive observation, but active spiritual engagement. To be seen is to be held in relation. Bengu’s figures often meet our gaze not with invitation, but with challenge. They ask us to do the hard work of seeing—not just them, but ourselves.

Overflow as Aesthetic and Spiritual Gesture

The titular phrase My Cup Runneth Over, drawn from Psalm 23:5, suggests abundance, grace, and divine provision. But Bengu complicates this theology. In her world, overflow is not only about joy or prosperity—it is about the uncontainable. The spilling over of pain, of remembrance, of inherited trauma and hard-earned hope. In her use of physical materials—soil that cracks and shifts, paint that bleeds beyond edges, collage elements that refuse containment—Bengu gives visual form to emotional saturation.

The overflowing cup becomes a symbol of life’s largeness—its messiness, its beauty, its ache. In this context, the “cup” is both literal and metaphoric: a vessel of spirit, a holder of memory, a sacred body. Bengu’s work insists that our vessels—like our stories—cannot be neatly contained or explained. They spill, leak, stain, and shimmer. And that is where their power lies.

Bongi Bengu’s My Cup Runneth Over is more than an exhibition; it is a sanctified space of reckoning. It invites us into a landscape where memory is textured, where stories are layered like bark and paper, where eyes look back, not in accusation, but in affirmation. Through her material choices, her feminist visual language, and her spiritual sensibility, Bengu crafts a narrative that is as deeply personal as it is collectively resonant.

Alongside her figurative works, Bengu offers a compelling body of abstract pieces marked by intricate patterns, rhythmic repetition, and organic geometries. These compositions are not merely decorative but are rooted in African Indigenous Knowledge Systems—evoking textiles, scarification markings, and ceremonial motifs that carry intergenerational meaning. The abstraction becomes a visual language of the ancestral, a non-linear archive where form communicates what language often cannot. In these works, shapes become syllables, and colours take on the cadence of prayer. This is abstraction as philosophy, where cosmology, ecology, and spiritual ritual converge. Bengu’s gestural layering and symbolic patterning remind us that abstraction, in her hands, is not a detour from narrative but a return to precolonial epistemologies—where knowledge was encoded in symbols, ritual, and the body itself.

In honouring her own journey, she honours ours. In rendering herself visible, she offers a mirror. In letting her cup overflow, she reminds us that we too hold multitudes—grief and grace, loss and light. And in the quiet radiance of her work, we are invited to remember, to witness, and perhaps, to heal. 

References
hooks, b. 1992. The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators. In Black Looks: Race and Representation, South End Press.
Campt, T. 2017. Listening to Images. Duke University Press.