Kelebogile Marope made history last month as the first artist from Botswana to win the FNB Art Prize. In this exclusive interview with YourLuxury Africa, she reflects on the significance of the moment, her sculptural practice, and her vision for the future of Southern African art.
YLA: You’ve just made history with your FNB Art Prize win. What does this moment mean to you and to the creative community back home?
Kelebogile: It still feels quite surreal. Personally, this moment carries the weight of many years of working, learning, questioning, and continuing to make, even when there was no certainty about where the work would lead. To have that journey recognised through the FNB Art Prize is deeply meaningful to me.
But I also understand that being the first artist from Botswana to receive the prize makes the moment larger than my own practice. Botswana has an incredibly rich creative community, and there are artists who have been working with commitment and integrity for many years. Sometimes what has been missing is not the quality of the work, but greater visibility and access to platforms beyond our borders.
So I hope this moment opens the door a little wider. I hope it creates curiosity about what is being made in Botswana and encourages people to look more closely at the artists working here. And perhaps most importantly, I hope another young artist in Botswana can see this and think, “There is a place for my work, too.”
YLA: Your work draws beautifully on domestic spaces and everyday materials. How do ordinary objects become extraordinary in your hands?
Kelebogile: My process often begins with noticing. I am drawn to objects and spaces that are so familiar that we almost stop seeing them – a plate, a door handle, the surface of a bath, or the marks left behind when something has been removed.
I spend quite a lot of time observing these objects and thinking about how we interact with them: how often we touch them, who has used them before us, and what kinds of routines or memories have accumulated around them. From there, I begin to isolate particular details, sometimes a mark, an indentation, a worn surface, or even an absence, and translate them through sculpture, relief, casting, painting, or other material processes.
What interests me is revealing that these objects were never really insignificant to begin with. They quietly hold evidence of how we have lived. By removing them from their familiar context, changing their scale, or concentrating on the traces around them, I am asking the viewer to slow down and encounter something they may have passed every day without really seeing.
YLA: The jury praised your ability to claim sculpture – a traditionally male-dominated medium – as your own. How did you develop your voice and technical approach within that space?
Kelebogile: My relationship with sculpture began quite early. In high school, I found myself naturally gravitating towards clay and towards making with my hands. There was something about working three-dimensionally, understanding form through touch, weight, balance, and material, that felt very instinctive to me.
As I continued studying sculpture, I also became increasingly aware that it was a space historically dominated by men, particularly when you move into processes that involve construction, heavy materials, machinery, and fabrication. I think, especially when I was younger, that awareness created a certain pressure to prove that I could do the work technically and that I belonged in that space. In some ways, it pushed me to become very attentive to material and process.
But over time, my relationship with sculpture changed. I became less interested in proving that I could work like anyone else and more interested in understanding what my sculptural language could be. That meant allowing materials associated with domesticity, memory, softness, and everyday life to enter the work alongside more traditional sculptural processes.
Today, I don’t think of claiming sculpture as simply occupying a traditionally male space. For me, it has been about expanding what sculpture can hold, both materially and conceptually, and trusting that my own experiences and ways of seeing are enough to build a sculptural language from.
YLA: You’ve spoken about building infrastructure for Southern African art. What does that look like to you, and how can this prize help turn that vision into reality?
Kelebogile: When I speak about infrastructure, I am thinking about everything that allows an artist to build and sustain a practice over time. It is not only about having galleries or exhibition spaces. It is also about education, mentorship, critical writing, documentation, collectors, museums, funding, production support, and strong networks between artists and institutions.
For Southern Africa, there is also an opportunity for us to strengthen the connections between our own countries. We have extraordinary artists working across the region, but sometimes the pathways that allow the work to circulate, be written about, collected, and preserved are still limited. I would love to see an ecosystem where an artist, whether they are in Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, or South Africa, can build a sustainable career from within the region while still participating confidently in the international art world.
The FNB Art Prize gives me access to a much larger platform, but I don’t see that access as something that should end with me. It gives me an opportunity to learn, to build relationships, and to understand more deeply how different parts of the art ecosystem function.
My hope is that, over time, I can bring some of that knowledge and those relationships back into the spaces I am already part of. If this moment can contribute, even in a small way, to creating more pathways for artists coming after me, then the prize begins to have a life beyond the award itself.
It gives me visibility, but more importantly, it gives me access – to people, institutions, conversations, and networks that I can learn from and build relationships with. The responsibility now is to think about how that access can extend beyond my own career: how I can connect people, share what I learn, advocate for artists from Botswana and the region, and contribute to creating opportunities where I can. For me, that is how infrastructure is built – not through one moment or one person, but through relationships and pathways that remain long after the moment has passed.
YLA: You’ll have a solo exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2027. Can you give us a glimpse of what you’re dreaming up for that show?
Kelebogile: I am still in the early stages, and there is something really exciting about that. I am researching, imagining, and allowing myself to dream a little, while giving the work enough space to reveal what it wants to become.
What I can say is that I want to go deeper into my ongoing investigation of domestic space, memory, and the traces that we leave behind through everyday living. I have spent years looking closely at individual domestic objects and fragments, and I am becoming increasingly interested in what happens when those fragments begin to form an environment.
The scale of the Johannesburg Art Gallery gives me an opportunity to think differently about that. I am thinking about how the viewer might not simply stand in front of an artwork, but physically encounter and move through a space, as though they are entering a memory or an archaeological site of everyday life.
At the moment, I am allowing myself to dream quite expansively. I want the exhibition to bring together sculpture, installation, material experimentation, and the language I have been developing through my recent work, but to push all those things further. I think the 2027 exhibition will be an opportunity for me to ask what happens when the intimate and deeply personal histories of the home are given the scale and presence of a public institution.
