SOLO SHOWS
2024
Kissing Studies, David Krut Projects, Johannesburg, South Africa
2023
The Weight of a Kiss, Ernest Cole Award, Johannesburg, South Africa
SELECTED GROUP SHOWS
2025
What’s the Word? Johannesburg!, Fondation A, Brussels, Belgium
2024
I Miss Myself the Most, Stevenson Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa
2022
AfroPolis, FNB Open City, Johannesburg, South Africa
Practices of Repair, Nothing Gets Organised, Johannesburg, South Africa
Interiorities, The Point of Order, Johannesburg, South Africa
2021
40 under 40, WhatIfTheWorld x Krone, Twee Jonge Wine Estate, Tulbagh, South Africa
Unusual Suspects, African Artist’s Foundation, Lagos, Nigeria
Home For the Holidays, Danger Gevaar Ingozi, Johannesburg, South Africa
2020
Tactile Visions-Woven, TurbineArt Fair (Online), Johannesburg, South Africa
The Nonrepresentational, Stevenson Gallery (Online), Johannesburg, South Africa
Now-Now, Gallery 114, Portland, USA
NeWWork, The Point of Order (Graduation Show), Johannesburg, South Africa
AWARDS AND GRANTS
2022
Ernest Cole Photography Award
The Prince Clause Seed Award
Abadali Art Fellowship
2021
Thami Mnyele Fine Arts Awards | Lizamore Prize
African Artists Foundation Artist Grant 2020
Nataal Media Top 10 Emerging Creatives
South African Reserve Bank Art Scholarship
Anya Millman Scholarship for outstanding practical work in Fine Arts
Giovanna Millner Scholarship for distinguished postgraduate and undergraduate work in Fine Arts and History of Art
RESIDENCIES
2022
Leipzig International Art Programme Residency, Leipzig, Germany
Love is a Battlefield, Artthrob, November 2023
Young and vital artists: Motlhoki Nono, Wanted, September 2023
Photo: presents Motlhoki Nono, the recipient of the Ernest Cole Award, Art Africa, August 2023
Nono Motlhoki makes history, Mail and Guardian, August 2022
Can ‘The Nonrepresentational’ prove a new model for artists and galleries?, Mail and Guardian, October 2020
Motlhoki Nono, Tiiso II, Digital scan on diasec, 21 x 29.7 cm, Edition of 3, 2023
Born in Pretoria in 1998. Lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.
In The Weight of a Kiss, Motlhoki explores intimacy through a series of scanner-performed images and video works that shift our understanding of the kiss—from a polished cinematic gesture to something more visceral, tender, and awkward. Using a flatbed scanner as both witness and collaborator, Motlhoki magnifies the textures of desire: lips, tongues, teeth, breath—rendered with unflinching honesty and strange, sculptural beauty.
Drawing from memories of rom-coms, soap operas, and first crushes, Motlhoki disrupts the familiar scripts of romance shaped by whiteness, heteronormativity, and gendered tropes. Her practice—what she calls Black Romantic Studies—centres Black, and femme intimacies, using found materials, performance, and digital media to interrogate how Romance is imagined, withheld, and performed.
In a world where Black women’s bodies are too often erased, harmed, or hyper-visible in violence, The Weight of a Kiss becomes both archive and intervention. It examines the socio-political contours of love, reframing intimacy not as escape, but as resistance and reclamation. Here, kissing is not simply an act—it is a question, a memory, a provocation. Each image is a refusal: to be made invisible, to be denied softness, to be excluded from love.
The Weight of a Kiss is the 2022 -2023 Ernest Cole Award Recipient
WORKS
THE WEIGHT OF A KISS
2023
