Omang Malerato I

Omang Malerato I (“Who Are You, Malerato?”) introduces the alter ego at her most intimate and unguarded. It is a close, unflinching portrait that fills the canvas with her gaze. Her face is adorned with real calamine lotion, its soft pink tones echoing a childhood practice once used to protect the artist’s skin from the Eastern Cape heat. In Malerato’s world, this humble ritual is elevated into a ceremonial act of presentation, a gentle, ancestral form of adornment that becomes her equivalent of royal skincare.

Fragments of wooden beads and a carved earring frame her face, referencing everyday Xhosa and Basotho textures that, in this imagined lineage, read as symbols of refined heritage. The vitiligo-like patterns created by the calamine overlay both conceal and reveal, suggesting a layered identity shaped by history, imagination, and the question at the heart of the series: What does a queen look like when her royalty is discovered only through memory and inheritance?

This artwork transforms an ordinary childhood tradition into a regal practice, positioning Malerato as the embodiment of a life lived between reality and imagined royalty. Her steady, searching eyes ask the viewer the very question posed in the title — Who is Malerato? — and by extension, Who might she have been?