Lerato Motaung joins Yolanda Maartens in the OFM Art Beat and talks about memories as fragments and explains why art can take you on a journey of your own. This exhibition is on until 24 July.

Second-hand luggage and worn donkey carts are given new artistic and poetic life in Motaung’s exhibition, where discarded objects become vessels of memory and meaning. Marked by time and use, each piece carries traces of past journeys – roads travelled, hands held, and stories unknown. 

Rather than erasing these histories, Motaung embraces them, allowing their narratives to exist alongside his own exploration of movement, loss, and what it means to carry.

Working with nearly obsolete suitcases, the artist restores both their physical presence and symbolic function.

“The suitcases are all purchased second-hand, which means they come with their own histories, which I cannot fully know, but can still feel,” he explains. This sense of the known and unknown gives the work its emotional depth.

Though rooted in painting and printmaking, Motaung’s practice has shifted into installation, where repetition now unfolds in space. Objects are layered like impressions, inviting viewers to move through the work rather than observe from a distance. The materials themselves – real and lived – heighten the immediacy of the experience.

Fragments of memory run throughout the exhibition. Luggage and carts evoke place, sound, and feeling, suggesting what remains when only pieces of the past endure. Shaped by his own journey from Katlehong to the North West and now Johannesburg, Motaung reflects on identity as fluid and continually forming. 

The exhibition’s title – loosely translated as “I did not make it, and it did not make itself” – speaks to how history, place, and culture shape who we become.

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