Part of Something Bigger Than You

Kamohelo Mahlatsi & Melokuhle Mdlopane, 2025

Part of Something Bigger Than You is a collaborative visual project between photographer Kamohelo Mahlatsi and painter Melokuhle Mdlopane. Set within a Zulu hostel in Katlehong, the series brings together staged photography and material-based abstraction to explore identity, protection, and collective belonging.

Working with two subjects, the project unfolds through constructed scenes where the body becomes both carrier and canvas. The figures wear leopard print vests that reference Zulu identity within a contemporary context, while their faces are concealed by razor blade masks created by Mdlopane. Rooted in the Bhaca concept of ukuBhaca, meaning to hide, these masks function as both protection and mark, obscuring individuality while asserting presence through pattern and texture.

Mahlatsi frames these gestures within a controlled visual language shaped by performance and stillness. An abstract painted canvas in saturated purples and pinks, produced by Mdlopane and physically integrated into the scenes, acts as both backdrop and intervention, collapsing distinctions between painting and photography, and between subject and environment.

At its core, the work reflects on the tension between individuality and collectivity. The obscured faces resist recognition, shifting attention toward a shared presence shaped by culture, memory, and inherited forms of protection. The project is driven by curiosity, asking what it means to be seen or hidden, and how identity is formed in relation to something larger than the self.

The hostel operates as a site of convergence, where histories of labor, migration, and communal life intersect with contemporary expressions of identity. Rather than offering fixed meanings, Part of Something Bigger Than You remains open-ended, holding space for ambiguity and positioning the image as a site of questioning, where belonging is both visible and concealed.