Mahashe works around the field of photography and museums, particularly at the intersection of artistic practice/research, archives, and afterlives of anthropology. His research takes kheloveduas a central idea, drawing on its capacity to complicate ways of knowing, practicing, and encouraging trans-disciplinarity.
His current project manifests as the research platform ‘––defunct context’ which engages the synergy and collaboration between art, science, technology, and Indigenous Knowledge Systems, meditating on the futures of photographic sensors and ideas of a camera. Mahashe’s latest Monograph ‘—defunct context: Ambivalence to important work’(2023) explores the artist book and its assembly as a process of inscribing his archive of practice as a physical dreamscape. The book consolidates 15 years of work around photography and the camera obscura; the refiguring of an anthropology museum and its photographic archive; the turn to indigenous knowledge systems to confirm and support contemporary scientific observations; as well as some collaborative exchanges with some peers. His artistic practice seen in installation projects like ‘Pavilion Prototype III: Camera Obscura #0 Mafadi’, commissioned for the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale(2026), engages photographies beyond representation, as well as installation as sites of participation and collaborative practice. Other exhibitions, including Interfacing New Heavens at the Javett art Centre(2021); Lifescapes–Six Object Biographies at Wits Art Museum (2017); The Jerusalem Show VIII: Before and After Origins as part of the Qalandiya International Biennale (2016); and the 10th and 11th Bamako Encounters–African Biennale of Photography (2015/2017); Gae Lebowa, Johannesburg Art Gallery(2010) which is his only published photographic series. He also contributed as a faculty member for the Lagos Biennale’s Curatorial Intensive hosted by the2nd Lagos Biennale.
Dr Mahashe is an Associate Professor at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town where he is lead researcher on several practice and research projects. He convenes the Honour in Curatorship programme, as well as the Foundation of Arts programme. He lectures in New Media, as well as on critical practices around the idea of the “new museum”, photographies, the internet as infrastructure and popular culture. He is the 2026 resident for Platform Dali, engaging with scientists at the Institute of High Energy Physic in Barcelona.