Lesotho-born multidisciplinary artist, lawyer, and researcher Thato Toeba interrogates the delicate intersections between personhood, politics, propaganda, nationalism, and globalization through their layered photomontages. Their collages are not merely aesthetic compositions — they are critical sites of resistance, where archives are questioned, and authority is unsettled.
From their home in Maseru, Lesotho’s capital, Toeba uses art to confront the structures that shape collective memory — the law, the church, the archive. Their practice probes how these instruments of power define who is remembered, who is glorified, and who is erased. Working across mediums and methodologies, Toeba constructs visual worlds that challenge audiences to reconsider the frameworks through which identity and belonging are produced.
“Just because a person is not present in the archives of their country,” Toeba reminds us, “that doesn’t mean they weren’t present in the place’s history.”
Suspicion of the System
Toeba’s creative process is rooted in what they call a “suspicion of format things” — the formalities and institutions that govern much of social life. Politics, religion, and law often intrude on the emancipated joy of existence, and it is precisely this tension that animates Toeba’s collages.
Their work asks: How much of what is socially obeyed is hallucinated?
In the cut-and-paste logic of collage, Toeba finds a way to mirror the fractured experience of modern existence — where memory and imagination, oppression and liberation, coexist uneasily. Their visual language refuses linear storytelling, instead layering archival photographs, found imagery, and contemporary portraits to evoke the simultaneous tenderness and hardship of life.
From Law to Collage
Born in 1990, Toeba’s intellectual journey began in the lecture halls of the National University of Lesotho, where they studied law. It was during this period — amid the #FeesMustFall movement in neighboring South Africa — that Toeba began to question the contradictions of institutional knowledge.
“The university was literally burning because people wanted a decolonial approach to education,” Toeba recalls. “And we were studying the colonial rhetoric about the world. I always found that contradiction interesting — it made it very difficult to do research within that convention.”
That dissonance between the lived reality of decolonial struggle and the rigidity of legal education became a turning point. Toeba’s artistic practice emerged as a counterpoint to academic discipline — a form of visual jurisprudence that uses collage to interrogate what counts as evidence, whose stories are deemed credible, and what remains outside the frame.
Lesotho Archives: A Counter-History
In addition to their artistic practice, Toeba founded the Lesotho Archives, an open-source platform dedicated to preserving and questioning the narratives that shape the nation’s identity. The project recognizes how historical records — especially colonial and ethnographic ones — are often biased, selective, and exclusionary.
“A country can be very specific about who it glorifies and who it ridicules,” Toeba notes. “People like me — with my background and sexuality — are not in the archives. We’re not there, but we are there in history.”
This assertion underscores a radical idea: that absence in the archive does not equate to absence in reality. Through collage, Toeba reclaims that invisibility, visually reintroducing marginalized lives into public memory. Their photomontages resist the archive’s authority by transforming it — blending fragments of old photographs with contemporary images to construct new, inclusive mythologies.
The Ethics of Reassembly
Toeba’s work is as much about ethics as it is about aesthetics. Each collage is a conversation — and sometimes a confrontation — with the people whose images inhabit the frame.
“I always have questions, like do they even want to be here? Do I have the right to liberate you? Is this liberating?” they ask. “There’s a lot of politicking that happens in my mind. But then there’s also the question of whether you can just let the archive be, without commentary? I don’t know whether all archives are better left alone.”
These self-reflexive questions position Toeba not as an archivist, but as a re-archiver — someone who intervenes in the visual record to expose its biases and fill its silences. Their process mirrors the work of decolonial thinkers and digital artists across Africa who are using creative technologies to reclaim historical narratives and reconstruct visual memory.
Recognition and Resonance
Winner of the 2025 FNB Art Joburg Prize, Toeba’s recognition marks a significant moment for Lesotho’s contemporary art scene. Their practice expands the language of African digital art, positioning collage as both a method and a metaphor for rewriting history in a globalized world.
Through their Instagram account @thatotoeba, and the Lesotho Archives, Toeba continues to share new visual experiments — blending critical theory, activism, and personal reflection. Their work reminds us that archives are living documents, constantly reshaped by those who dare to imagine differently.
Reimagining the Future
In a time when the politics of representation dominate both digital and physical spaces, Toeba’s work feels particularly urgent. Their collages are visual arguments — meditations on visibility, power, and presence. They compel us to confront the mechanisms that determine whose stories endure and whose disappear.
By merging art, law, and research, Thato Toeba exemplifies a new kind of African digital practitioner — one who navigates between the analytical and the poetic, the personal and the political.
Their work doesn’t just question the accuracy of the archive. It transforms it — inviting us to participate in the ongoing project of remembering, reimagining, and remaking history.
Follow Thato Toeba:
Instagram – @thatotoeba
Lesotho Archives – @lesothoarchives
References:
– WePresent: Thato Toeba
– Nataal: Thato Toeba
– FNB Art Joburg
