“On slick, cold surfaces of recycled rubber, black as crude oil, or on sepia-toned vintage photographs, South African artist Hannalie Taute weaves coloured threads into seductive, unsettling stories. These stories are dense with metaphor and hidden meanings. Figures rise from her stitches: shouting, slipping in, digging deep. Nothing here is calm or soothing. The work plays openly with visceral fears. Your gaze is caught by uncompromising, brutal, courageous details. What draws you in is a magnetic narrative that sparks curiosity and leaves you uneasy, just beneath the skin. Through her art, Taute prods our most intimate reactions.
Her disobedience plays with stereotypes. Taute steps into the role of “woman”, questioning it from within. Precisely where society trains it into composure, between marriage, motherhood and “respectability”.
This core, made of memories, the private sphere, and social constraint, sits at the heart of her latest solo show, Mother. Monster. Stitch. (6 December 2025 – 22 February 2026), a monographic reading curated by Karolien van Zyl and presented by Berman Contemporary. Here, the family portrait “misbehaves”: the rituals of femininity are pierced and re-stitched until they become raw material, at times grotesque, at times playful. Embroidery declares itself as resistance, a tactile rebellion that overturns the codes of being “in the right place.”
Her social critique, brutal and ironic, runs through the needle. Embroidery no longer stands for docility and obedience, nor does it automatically cast the embroiderer as the worthy wife and mother. And yet, Taute avoids slogans. Her arena is the private: domestic mythology, the intimate theatre where identities and rules are formed. Her politics live in the in-between, in everyday life. She shows how control over women’s bodies and images passes through what seems harmless: the wedding album, the composed pose, the required smile and how, precisely there, a needle can become a declaration.
Her identity is bound to family and land. She lives in a small rural village in South Africa, far from Johannesburg and Cape Town. Although she works internationally, she keeps a strong connection to her roots: “The past matters to know where we are going, but we mustn’t get stuck there.” Formed within Afrikaner Calvinism, where nationalism, patriarchy and religious morality historically operated as interlocking regimes of social discipline rather than belief alone, she carries a cultural legacy in which gender roles were institutionally enforced. This is not a matter of private biography so much as a structural ideological formation: a lived, everyday apparatus that regulates intimacy, organizes kinship relations, and produces “respectability” by training bodies and subjectivities into sanctioned forms of visibility.
She often uses old family album photographs, images that feel close and yet remain mysterious. She frequently doesn’t know the people depicted. This gives her permission to invent new stories: faces loosen from identity and become something else. Those photographs also speak of colonial histories, inherited rules, traditions carried across continents; strict norms set against an extreme landscape, in a country where politics and society remain painful subjects.
Through her interventions, the old photographs take on a new identity: bridal couples wear faces turned into masks. Natural elements surface on the sepia ground, fractals and flowers, writing, animal fragments, transfiguring the sacredness of the image and the memories it carries. Rubber sometimes supports and frames the image, lending a dystopian edge to these contemporary treasures: a past that is still present, still charged. (…)”
