Moshekwa Langa was born in 1975 in Bakenberg, Limpopo, and lives in Amsterdam. He studied at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam during 1997-98. From this weekend, his large floor-based installation Mogalakwena, recently acquired by the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, will be on view at the museum as part of New New Babylon: Visions for Another Tomorrow.
Rising to international prominence in the late 1990s, Langa was an active participant in what is now considered the golden age of biennales; including those of Johannesburg (1997), Istanbul (1997), Havana (1997), São Paulo (1998 and 2010), Gwangju (2000), Venice (2003 and 2009) and Lyon (2011).
Langa presented Omweg at KM21 in Den Haag in 2022, and in the fall of 2026 he will be the subject of a mid-career survey at Melly. Previous solo exhibitions have taken place at institutions including Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam (1998); Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva (1999); the Renaissance Society in Chicago (1999); the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati (2003); Kunstverein Dusseldorf (2004); the National Museum of the 21st Century Arts (MAXXI) in Rome (2005); Modern Art Oxford (2007); Kunsthalle Bern (2011); Krannert Art Museum in Champaign, Illinois (2013); and the ifa Galleries in Stuttgart and Berlin (2014); Chapel of the Cordeliers, Toulouse (2021); and A4 Art Foundation, Cape Town (2024).
Langa was included in the seminal group exhibitions The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945-1994, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (touring 2001-2); Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, New Museum, New York (touring 2003-4); How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (touring 2003-5); A Fiction of Authenticity, Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis (touring 2003-6); Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora, Museum for African Art, New York (touring 2003-6); Africa Remix, Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf (touring 2004-7); Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography, International Center of Photography, New York (touring 2006-8), Flow, The Studio Museum, Harlem, New York (2008); and The Global Contemporary. Art Worlds after 1989, ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, Germany (2011). More recently he has shown in Arte Povera and South African Art: In Conversation at Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg (2023); The Show is Over at South London Gallery, UK (2022); A Clearing in the Forest at Tate Modern, UK (2022); Globalisto. A Philosophy in Flux at Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole (2022); Mapping Worlds, Norval Foundation, Cape Town (2019); Crossing Night: Regional Identities X Global Context, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2019); Material Insanity at Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden, Marrakech (2019); We Don’t Need Another Hero at 10th Berlin Biennale (2018); The Read Hour at 13th Dakar Biennale (2018); Afrique Capitales which spread across La Vilette and Paris, France (2017) as well as Art/Afrique, le nouvel atelier at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (2017).