Tshepiso Moropa: Rebuilding Memory Through Collage

When Tshepiso Moropa finished high school, art was not the path she took. Following her parents' advice, she enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she studied psychology and linguistics before completing postgraduate work in linguistics and research. The decision did not close the door on art. Instead, those disciplines became part of the way she now approaches images, language, memory and identity.

Today, Moropa is a Johannesburg-based visual artist whose practice centers on collage, photography and storytelling. Born in 1995, she has developed a distinctive approach to African archival imagery, combining found photographs with personal photographs, digital manipulation and painstaking hand-cut collage. Her work asks what happens when an old photograph is removed from its original context and placed inside a new story. Rather than treating the archive as an unquestionable record, Moropa treats it as something that can be examined, challenged and imagined again.

That approach has brought her growing international attention. She received the Out of Africa Award in 2022, the Contemporary African Photography Prize in 2024 and the V&A Parasol Foundation Women in Photography Prize in 2025. Her work has appeared at platforms including Paris Photo and 1-54 London, while in 2026 she presented work with THK Gallery at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair.

A practice built from fragments

Collage suits Moropa because fragmentation sits at the center of her subject matter. Her images often begin with photographs that already carry a history. She finds portraits in libraries, online research collections and archives, while also drawing from her own photographs and family material. She then cuts, layers, enlarges and repositions these fragments until they become part of another visual narrative.

Moropa has described the archive as a place of both "excavation and recreation". That distinction matters. Excavation suggests looking for what has been buried or overlooked. Recreation acknowledges that the artist cannot simply recover the past as it was. She has to reconstruct it.

Her work therefore occupies the space between historical evidence and imagination. A photographed figure may have existed decades before Moropa encountered the image. Still, once she places that figure beside another body, an animal, a landscape or an unexpected object, the photograph acquires another life.

Writers have repeatedly picked up on this tension. Colossal describes her collages as minimal but weighty, emphasizing how she uses archival material and oral histories to reconsider the stories people inherit. The Photographic Collective similarly identifies memory, family, race, gender, love, sexuality, and belonging as recurring concerns in her practice.

Her psychology background gives this interest in memory another dimension. Moropa does not approach memory as a perfect record. Her images suggest that memory shifts, disappears, returns,s and changes through storytelling. Her linguistics background is equally relevant. Language carries cultural knowledge, and oral traditions can preserve histories that never entered official archives.

Setswana stories and the archive

Moropa's recent work has moved deeply into Setswana folklore and dreams. Two concepts recur: Dinaane, referring to Setswana folktales, and Ditoro, meaning dreams. She draws from stories passed through family and from research into Setswana folklore, African spirituality and magic.

This gives her collage practice a strong connection to oral history. A folktale does not remain fixed when people tell it. Each teller brings memory, emphasis and interpretation. Moropa's collages work in much the same way. She takes an existing image or story and changes its relationship to everything around it.

Her aunt's stories are particularly important to the way she thinks about Setswana narratives. Rather than illustrating those stories literally, Moropa translates their emotional and symbolic qualities into images. The result can feel strange, theatrical, or dreamlike without becoming an illustration of a single plot.

That quality appears in works such as The Flying Girl, Stranger Fruit, Who Knows Where the Time Goes and The Girl and The Pig. Her recent works move between the familiar and the uncanny, often placing human figures in carefully constructed spaces where time appears unstable. THK Gallery describes these works as occupying overlapping temporalities, where meaning remains open rather than arriving at a single conclusion.

The importance of the photograph

Photography remains crucial to Moropa's practice even when the final object looks more like a collage than a photograph. She is interested in what photographs claim to do: preserve people, places and moments. But she is equally interested in what photographs leave out.

This becomes especially important when working with African archives. Historical photographs were often produced within unequal systems of power. The camera could document a person while also reducing that person to a type, a subject or an object of observation. Moropa's response is not to abandon these images but to take them apart and give them another context.

Her earlier work directly confronted the disproportionate representation of Black people in historical imagery and the repeated association of Black bodies with pain and suffering. Her collages instead make room for pleasure, intimacy, family, beauty, and ambiguity. A 2023cataloge for her exhibition The Night Recital described this process as a form of "re-membering and reimagining" Blackness, using archival images to create new narratives around Black pleasure and lore.

This is one reason her work matters beyond its visual appeal. Moropa does not simply add more Black faces to contemporary photography. She questions the systems through which images of Black people have been made, stored and remembered.

Handcraft, digital collage and expanded forms

Moropa's medium is not limited to one technique. She works with both digital and analog collage, and the relationship between the two is central to her process.

She often begins by researching a story and collecting possible images. She then uses an iPad to work out scale, proportion and composition before printing the selected elements and constructing the physical collage. The handmade stage demands precision. She has spoken about the difficulty of cutting accurately, controlling glue and choosing the right paper. Once assembled, the physical work may be scanned or photographed, especially when it contains three-dimensional elements.

That process gives the work a physical intelligence. A digital image can be endlessly rearranged. A hand-cut piece cannot. Every cut becomes permanent. Every layer occupies physical space.

Her practice has also expanded beyond flat collage into film, stop-motion animation, installations and sculptural forms such as peep-boxes and dioramas. In The Ride Home, for example, Moropa combines animation with music and sound design, extending her interest in storytelling beyond the still image.

A different kind of archive

Moropa's impact lies partly in how she changes the role of the archive. Instead of presenting history as a finished account, she makes it something viewers can enter and reconsider.

This approach connects her to a wider movement of contemporary African artists who work against the authority of colonial and historical archives. Her inclusion in A Kind of Paradise, an exhibition at Museum Rietberg examining colonial-era photography through contemporary art, places her work within this larger conversation. Ocula's coverage of the exhibition notes how Moropa uses archival portraits to invoke ancestors and combines memories and dreams to imagine identities that photographs alone cannot recover.

Her contribution is distinct because she does not rely only on confrontation. Her work can be critical without becoming visually heavy-handed. The stark backgrounds, suspended figures, and carefully controlled compositions create room for contemplation. They allow questions about history and identity to sit alongside wonder.

Her stated interest in belonging is equally important. Moropa's collages celebrate Blackness and cultural heritage, but they do not reduce belonging to a political slogan. They locate belonging within memory, family, imagination,n and self-recognition.

Why focus on Tshepiso Moropa?

Moropa deserves attention because her work brings several important conversations together without forcing them into a single message. She connects photography with collage, academic research with intuition, archival material with family stories, and contemporary image-making with Setswana oral tradition.

Her career also demonstrates how a practice can develop without following a conventional route. She studied psychology and linguistics rather than fine art, yet those subjects continue to inform the questions she asks. Her training in research is visible in the way she approaches archives; her interest in language is present in her engagement with oral histories; and her understanding of memory informs the way she reconstructs images.

Most importantly, Moropa offers a way of looking at African history that does not depend entirely on official records. She reminds viewers that what has not been documented can still be remembered, and what has been documented can still be questioned.

Her collages do not claim to recover a perfect past. They create possibilities for meeting it again.

That makes Tshepiso Moropa an artist worth following now. Her work speaks to questions that remain urgent in contemporary art: Who controls the archive? Who gets remembered? What happens to stories passed from one generation to another? And how can artists use old images to imagine futures that the original photographs could never have predicted?

Moropa answers through scissors, photographs, research, folklore, and imagination. She cuts the archive open and makes space for something new.