Justice Mukheli
Justice Mukheli is a self-taught filmmaker and photographer that lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. He started his career in advertising as an Art Director in 2009. In his personal work, Justice focuses on telling Authentic South African stories that are relatable and familiar. His work strives to inspire South Africa and Africa to tell its own stories.
“My childhood and upbringing have a huge influence on my work. On the one hand, growing up in Soweto was magical and gave me a sense of the richness and beauty of the small daily victories and challenges that made my community.
So this understanding that every person has a story and that story is worth capturing has shaped my work. Interacting with people through my lens gives me a new language through which to express my emotions - pain, joy, sadness, forgiveness - without having to necessarily articulate those emotions in words. I am drawn to unearthing the soulfulness in the stories I get an opportunity to tell. I love to create work that has a nostalgic feeling, a relatable feeling, a sense of newness and familiarity. I strive to create work that allows the viewer/audience to relive moments they have shared with friends, loved ones, and their community.”
His clients included, Fader Magazine, Diesel, Levis, Art Comes First, Google, Jeep, British American Tobacco, Nikon, South African Tourism, Colgate, Adidas, Lotto, Old Mutual, Simon&Marry.
Justice Mukheli
(born in Soweto) is a South African filmmaker, photographer, and creative entrepreneur.
He is known for creating art or film that centers on the African experience.
Justice shot a commercial for Ballantines in 2021 around their campaign Stay True: There’s No Wrong Way. Justice Mukheli was featured at the 4th edition of the Also Known As Africa contemporary art fair in Paris in 2019 as a photographer.
Mukheli’s fluid, engulfing compositions are inspired by his upbringing in Soweto, South Africa, reflecting on a host of themes from masculinity and blackness to ancestry and spirituality. Mukheli’s process is rapid and his compositions engrossing - taking cues from his past as a photographer he paints contemporary portraits which lapse into the abstract, looking to challenge both our perception of portraiture and what it means to be African. Mukheli attempts to reconnect with his ancestral past - an Africa unshaped by colonisation and Christianity and instead built through spirituality. By telling these stories of past, the figures take on a ghost like quality, in many ways diminished and blurred by the riot of marks engulfing them. For Mukheli, turning to the paintbrush has become a meditative process which allows him to connect with the past - a focus on experience and emotion over documentation. Mukheli’s figures are freed from the shackles of masculinity and the pressures of identity, instead taking on a fluid, somewhat genderless form that is reflective of the spirit. In doing so Mukheli navigates the nuances associated with being a young black man in a post-internet world, in a way that feels both confident yet shy.
