Cow Mash – ditšwatšhemong

 [di tšwa] – they come from / the origins of
[tshemong] – the field / land

ditšwatšhemong speaks to lineage, source, and belonging. It is both spatial and spiritual, understanding land as place and as memory, ancestry, and knowledge. The exhibition reflects Cow Mash’s practice of working across time while imagining speculative futures where indigenous knowledge systems and spiritual cosmologies coexist and evolve.

Beginning with masekitlana, an indigenous storytelling game, and closing with a familiar nursery song reinterpreted through Sepedi vowels, Cow intentionally creates an intergenerational space of play and learning. Viewers enter through a reimagined street-language environment that echoes everyday informal and survival infrastructures. Beyond the glass doors, the space shifts into an exploratory landscape of unidentified seedlings preserved in glass are cared for by the Balemi (farmers), while a quiet corner holds a waskom (metal bathtub) with migrating cows as an intimate moment of movement. As you enter the inner sacred space where waskoms and planters gather beneath the aerial view of tshemong, it invites you to be the farmer, forming a sacred site of origin and becoming. 

Rooted in Cow Mash’s practice of lineage, ancestral knowledge, and matrilineal memory, the exhibition reflects her self-positioning as a transdimensional farmer: a figure who cultivates not only land, but memory, ritual, and future worlds. At its core, this exhibition is a search for the grandmother’s garden, a metaphorical site of abundance, knowledge, healing, and origin that runs through Cow’s practice. 

The exhibition is curated by Puleng Plessie, Curator: Education and Public Programming and Storm Janse van Rensburg, Interim Curatorial Director with the Javett-UP curatorial team.