Thero Makepe (b. 1996, Botswana) is an artist who works primarily in photography. While the various series he has produced over the past six years reflect a wide array of interests, his practice primarily reflects on personal and societal narratives of his upbringing in Botswana and South Africa.
Makepe’s photographs are characterised by a fascination with discrepancy and disillusionment. Whether staged or spontaneous, fictional or autobiographical, Makepe’s scenes speak to the sense of dread that seems increasingly to pervade our everyday lives, despite society’s avid attempts to obscure or overlook its own inadequacies.
Personal and political histories connected to his home country of Botswana are central to Makepe’s practice. In 2018, the series Monna O Montsho saw the artist construct maquettes of his childhood home, which he used to dramatise nostalgic memories and commemorate family stories. Fly Machine/Mogaka honoured the life of Major Cliff Manyuni, a Botswana Defence Force (BDF) pilot who met his untimely death after steering a malfunctioning fighter jet away from highly populated areas in Gaborone, thus saving many lives in the process. Continuing these interests, Makepe produced two bodies of work called Music from My Good Eye (2019) and We Didn’t Choose To Be Born Here (2020 – 2022) respectively. Both are inspired by Makepe’s grandfather, Hippolytus Mothopeng, a jazz musician who performed in exile in Botswana after escaping South Africa in 1958. The latter project also draws on the story of his grandfather’s uncle, Zephaniah Mothopeng, who became the president of Pan-African Congress of Azania (PAC) and was detained twice on Robben Island. Considering how personal histories intersect with social and historical forces, Makepe combined photography and archive to trace entanglements of hope and pain across his lineage.
While travel has significantly impacted his practice since 2022, Makepe’s most recent body of work, It’s Not Going to Get Better (2024) sees the photographer return to Botswana as site and subject, focusing specifically on the runup to the 2024 general elections. “Broadly, throughout this series of images, I aim to create counter-propaganda to the mainstream narrative that Botswana is a highly stable, democratic, and economically prosperous nation.” Using a mix of stylistic devices, from staged tableaux and still-life images to documentary and landscape photography, It's Not Going to Get Better explores the deferred dreams left in the wake of class disparity and political instability. Working with family and friends, who serve as both subjects and collaborators, Makepe considers with subtlety the sense of nihilism that lies at the heart of civic life which has, over time, been eroded by coloniality, corruption, and cronyism. “I try to employ duality as a tool to illustrate this crisis. In my work, the plight of working-class individuals trapped in hopeless situations is contrasted with that of aristocrats, who, despite having everything, stand atop their balconies—and above others experiencing a different kind of emptiness.”, says the artist.
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Thero Makepe was born in 1996 and raised in Gabarone, Botswana. He completed his Bachelor of Fine Art with distinction at the University of Cape Town, majoring in photography, and has since lived and worked between Gabarone, Cape Town, and Johannesburg. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including presentations at Stevenson and Latitudes in Johannesburg and the Foam Museum in Amsterdam.
In 2023, the artist was the recipient of the MEP residency – Gervanne Collection + Matthias Leridon – Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. In 2022, Makepe was selected for the Invisible Borders Trans-African Road Trip: Whispers of the Wilderness, which took place in the Okavango Delta, Botswana, Angola and Namibia. Both trips were inspirations for the ongoing series The Powers that Be (2024). Makepe has been awarded the Prince Claus Seed Award, the Der Grief Guest Room Scholarship, and the Tierney Fellowship. He was a finalist for Blurring the Lines, awarded by the Paris College of Art, and a participant in the Foam Talent mentorship programme. In 2024 Makepe was shortlisted for the Contemporary African Photography (CAP) Prize.
Makepe’s work has been published in Foam Magazine, GIDA Journal and Courrier International. His works are the in collections of the University of Cape Town and Javett-UP. In 2019, Makepe co-founded The Botswana Pavilion, an artist collective dedicated to developing Botswana’s artistic archive. As a group, the Botswana Pavilion has exhibited in Frankfurt, Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Gaborone. In 2021, Hans Ulricht Obrist and András Szántó commissioned The Botswana Pavilion as a part of the Unfinished Camp project.
