Conjugating the Future Through Storytelling: A Few Notes on the Art of Thania Petersen

I first met Thania Petersen at her home in September 2022 during a visit to South Africa. It was on one of those chilly spring nights in Cape Town, when the wind blows the vibrant green leaves off their branches, and the stars, in their finest attire, adorn the sky. Sitting around a warm meal she had prepared, we discussed arts, politics, and music as time passed by. Growing up in Cameroon, many of us had heard about Nelson Mandela’s fight against apartheid and danced to Miriam Makeba’s 1967 iconic hit, “Pata Pata.”We had all, in more recent times, witnessed South Africa hosting the first-ever football World Cup on African soil, so sitting there in her living room and processing everything such a place, long heard and dreamt of, had to offer, felt somehow surreal. 

With a practice carefully honed over several decades, Petersen effortlessly transitions between various media, including photography, performance, installation, video, and sound. Trained in sculpture at the Central Saint Martins College of Art, London, Thania Petersen’s journey in the art world led her in her early years from the ateliers of the Zimbabwean master sculptor Sylvester Mubayi and the renowned South Korean ceramist Hwang Yea Sook, to some of the most critical art platforms such as the Sao Paulo Biennial this year or the Zeitz Mocaa in Cape Town, where she currently resides. 

In a recently published interview with Thembeka Heidi Sincuba, Petersen points out that “growing up during an apartheid regime in South Africa meant that everyone was kind of in a state of exile because nobody was where they were meant to be.” 

SONOP/SONAF – Embroidery thread on Cotton PoplinStuffing, Appliqué 2021
Image courtesy of the artist

This constant feeling and reminder of being in a state of exile undoubtedly plays a significant role in Petersen’s creative process, making her work compelling precisely because it resists the simplification of identity. Embracing multiplicity and contradiction, she uses love and humor, among many other tools, to propose counter-stories built on resilience and continuity, rather than centered on trauma and despair.

As she further elaborates in the same interview, her first body of work, I Am Royal from 2015, was, ironically, never intended as a means to enter the art world, but rather as a gift to her kids, and by extension, to all the children in the Cape Malay community. I Am Royal is a reminder that, beyond the lens of exile or enslavement applied to her community and their forebearers, Cape Malays are, for some, literally of royal lineages, as was the case of Tuang Guru, an imam and direct descendant of an Indonesian royal dynasty. He was imprisoned on Robben Island for a few decades where he is believed to have re-written the Quran by memory.

Memory plays a central role in Petersen’s practice. Indeed, throughout recent years, she has traveled extensively across several countries in Africa and Asia, listening to and tracing various Sufi sonic practices and their ability to carry memory across different communities. In one of her most recent pieces, a film titled Jawap, presented at the 36th São Paulo Biennial, Petersen emphasizes the importance of dhikrs—devotional acts sung either loudly or silently in worship of God across Sufi communities—as “liberatory technologies” from and for the future. By highlighting the inextricable tie between this practice, historically performed as an act of remembrance, and times yet to come, Petersen adds a new meaning to our understanding of dhikrs, and inscribes herself and her work even more in a gesture of storytelling. Not one who seeks to merely recite the past, Petersen is resolutely forward-facing, and her work reminds us we are future ancestors whose current actions will shape the generations ahead of us. It is an appeal to constitute a future collective memory and a bid to investigate what one of such could sound like. 

In a time when conversations about race, migration, and faith are more urgent than ever, Thania Petersen’s art offers a profoundly generative space to critically address societal ills such as islamophobia, colonialism, and imperialism. Her body of work, whether in tapestries, performances, and films, among others, invites us to reimagine belonging—not as fixed categories, but rather as living, breathing legacies constantly in flux.