Nomaza Nongqunga Coupez’s art residency program facilitates practice focused visits to the South ff France for female South African artists, resulting in their transformative empowerment.
God knew the African woman was going to have a very, very hard life,” writes Sindiwe Magona in Beauty’s Gift, her paean to the fi erce sororal resilience of female survivors. “He gave her that tough, timeless skin so that her woes would not be written all over her face, so that her face would not be a map to her torn and tattered heart.”
This pain, and its healing, is instead charted in other ways; in South Africa, it is embedded in and articulated through the artistic expression of women who transform generational trauma into palliative innovation and creativity. To trace the journey of the artist Nthabiseng Boledi Kekana is to understand the ways in which South African women support and uplift one another; how female agency is liberated through opportunity and empowerment.
