Meleko Mokgosi

Meleko Mokgosi is an artist and Associate Professor at the Yale School of Art. His large-scale, figurative, and often text-based works engage history painting and cinematic tropes to uncover notions of colonialism, democracy, and liberation across African history. His most recent body of work, Democratic Intuition (2013 – 2020) poses questions about ideas of the democratic in relation to the daily-lived experiences of the subjects that occupy southern Africa. Touching on the often-contradictory notions inherent in the concept and practice of democracy — the individual in the face of the collective, intuitive versus inscribed behaviors — Mokgosi probes the idiosyncratic ways in which democracy is reciprocated and unfolds across time.