The residency programme culminates in a showcase of new work shaped by experimentation, mentorship, and interdisciplinary exchange.
At a time when conversations around creative development increasingly centre sustainability and access, residency programmes continue to offer something increasingly rare: space. Space to experiment, refine, fail, collaborate, and rethink practice outside the demands of production.
The Nike Air Max Residency at Latitudes emerges within this context, bringing together emerging creatives across art, fashion, and music through a mentorship-driven programme designed to foster experimentation and interdisciplinary exchange. Developed during the March residency programme, the initiative provided mentees with an environment to engage new ideas, materials, and modes of making under the guidance of established practitioners.
This weekend, the programme culminates in a showcase at Latitudes, presenting works by four emerging visual artists: Themba Mwanza, Mbali Nqobile Mdikane, Jordan Bareiss, and Assante Chiweshe. While distinct in medium and approach, their practices converge around questions of memory, identity, materiality, and transformation.
Materiality and Experimentation: Themba Mwanza
Johannesburg-based multidisciplinary artist Themba Mwanza approaches contemporary art through experimentation and visual storytelling. Originally from Mpumalanga and a graduate of the University of the Witwatersrand’s Fine Arts programme, Mwanza’s practice reflects an interdisciplinary sensibility informed by material investigation and conceptual inquiry.
In recent years, his work has garnered institutional recognition. During his studies, Mwanza developed his own iteration of the BMW Art Car series, later acquired into BMW’s private collection and exhibited at NIROX Sculpture Park as part of BMW Art Generation Vol. III in 2025. Within the context of the residency, his practice continues to probe the possibilities of materiality as both method and language.
Memory, Inheritance, and Relational Worlds: Mbali Nqobile Mdikane
For Mbali Nqobile Mdikane, painting functions as a means of navigating intimacy, identity, and inherited memory. Born between Mthatha and East London and now based in Johannesburg, Mdikane’s autobiographical practice considers how relationships shape individual understandings of selfhood.
Boxing, introduced through her father, frequently appears in her work as an inherited language through which ideas of discipline, tenderness, masculinity, and performance are explored. Yet her practice extends beyond singular familial relationships, tracing the relational ecosystems shaped by mothers, grandmothers, siblings, extended family, and community.
Grounded in a Xhosa postcolonial consciousness, Mdikane’s evolving practice also gestures toward expanded material forms, including soft sculpture, digital collage, photography, and mixed media.
Between Analogue and Digital: Jordan Bareiss
Working across digital art, photography, mixed media, and interactive installation, Jordan Bareiss investigates the friction and overlap between analogue and digital worlds.
Drawing from mysticism, nostalgia, and the textured terrains of South African landscapes, particularly the Drakensberg, Bareiss constructs works that feel at once archival and speculative. Using his own photographic documentation as source material, he creates layered visual environments that resemble recovered artefacts, examining how technology mediates memory and alters relationships to landscape.
His practice reflects broader contemporary anxieties and curiosities around digital transformation, while remaining deeply rooted in place and materiality.
Reimagining the Archive: Assante Chiweshe
For visual artist Assante Chiweshe, photography becomes both a point of departure and a site of inquiry. Working across photography, moving image, and mixed media, her practice investigates the relationship between past, present, and future through engagements with memory, lineage, identity, and the family archive.
Often reconstructing inherited images, Chiweshe’s work recontextualises personal histories, positioning image-making as a form of reflection, preservation, and transformation. Though still early in her contemporary art practice, her interdisciplinary approach points toward an emerging visual language attentive to both personal and collective histories.
Beyond the Residency
Rather than a final destination, the showcase signals a moment within an ongoing process of development. At Latitudes, the works on display offer insight into how emerging artists are negotiating questions of identity, inheritance, technology, and belonging through increasingly interdisciplinary approaches.
In doing so, the Nike Air Max Residency reflects a broader investment in creative ecosystems that prioritise experimentation as much as outcome, creating space for artists not only to make work, but to expand the languages through which they think and create.
