Thato Toeba Lesotho

A photo collage of a choir group singing, the silhouettes of the members filled with other images—a man’s face, a child holding on to their father’s knee and a man relaxing in nature.

Thato Toeba is an artist, lawyer and researcher from Maseru, Lesotho’s capital, whose creative work is centered around mixed-media photomontages. Influenced by a “suspicion of format things, such as politics and institutions” which can intrude on the emancipated joy of life, Toeba uses photographs to convey “how much of what is socially obeyed is hallucinated,” their work questions the accuracy of historical archives and looks to show the ways the tenderness and the hardships of life intertwine.