WHERE WE BECOME
a solo exhibition by Tusevo Landu
1 - 29 October 2026
My ghetto love song, it goes on and on and on and on by Tusevo Landu | Oil and mixed media on shade cloth | 123cm x 123cm.
WORLDART is pleased to present Where We Become, a solo exhibition of new work by Congolese-born, South African-based artist Tusevo Landu. The exhibition opens on Thursday, 1 October and runs until Thursday, 29 October 2026 at the gallery's Long Street space in Cape Town.
Where We Become examines the formation of selfhood through place, familial relationships, cultural inheritance and lived experience, treating identity not as fixed or singular but as an ongoing process shaped by the environments we inhabit and the relationships we encounter.
A recurring element within the paintings is the African mask, which appears across the faces of Landu's figures. Drawing from his Congolese heritage, the mask functions as both a cultural signifier and a conceptual device. “Living in South Africa has placed my experience of selfhood within a space of cultural negotiation, where inherited histories exist alongside the influences of the environment in which I have lived and developed,” says Landu. “The mask becomes a means of retaining and activating cultural heritage within the present. It obscures the individual face while simultaneously revealing another dimension of the figure, suggesting that ancestry, cultural memory and personal experience can coexist within the construction of the self.”
The works are painted in oil on repurposed shade cloth, a material Landu first encountered through his mother's work as a tailor, who used it to construct temporary stalls while selling garments at flea markets — a material link between maternal labour, personal history and artistic production that carries traces of a lived social and familial context. Its physical properties extend this thinking further: shade cloth provides shelter and a sense of enclosure, yet its porous structure allows light and air to pass through, a duality that mirrors how the spaces we inhabit can offer both belonging and exposure to the forces that shape us.
Built up in layers of oil that suggest sedimentation and recollection, the paintings parallel the formation of the self as something gradual and never complete. Where We Become ultimately proposes that becoming is not a departure from where we come from, but an ongoing negotiation between what is inherited, what is experienced, and what is carried forward.
Tusevo Landu (b. 1997, Kinshasa, DRC) trained initially at Artists Proof Studio in Johannesburg before developing into a self-taught painter working across acrylic, oil, printmaking and mixed media, with a practice often centred on the reimagining of cultural artefacts — particularly Congolese ceremonial masks — as vessels of identity and memory. He has held solo exhibitions at the Association for Visual Arts, Cape Town (2026) and Everard Read, Cape Town (2024), following an earlier solo presentation with Simchowitz in Pasadena, California (2022), and has shown in numerous group exhibitions with Everard Read, Under The Aegis and Girls, Girls, Girl in Cape Town, among others. His work is held in the Michaelis School of Fine Art, Africa South Art Initiative, Cape Grace Hotel, and Simchowitz collections.
Exhibition details:
Exhibition: Where We Become
Artist: Tusevo Landu
Dates: Thursday, 1 October – Thursday, 29 October 2026
Venue: WORLDART, 68 Long Street, Cape Town