Popihuise takes its name from the Afrikaans word for a children’s dollhouse game, and Vuyo Mabheka builds his series the way a child might furnish a room: from whatever is at hand. Working with cutouts drawn from the few photographs that exist of him as a child, he sets himself into interiors and scenes of his own construction, on colour fields he makes himself. Sometimes other figures join him, represented by people from his community whom he secretly photographed, and sometimes a fantasised and faceless father figure appears. Drawings, collages and photographs coexist in a seemingly naive and tender universe, so that this surface holds harder material: shiny cars, skyscrapers, burning tires and new pavilions on one side, cultivated fields, colourful birds, graffiti and blossoming trees on the other, highlighting the tension between liberalism and modernity.
Mabheka was born in 1999 in the rural town of Libode in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, and lives in Thokoza, Johannesburg, where he discovered photography in 2017 through Of Soul and Joy, a creative platform that aims to provide the township’s youth and its surroundings with professional skills in the field of photography. Popihuise is his first book. He is the recipient of the 2023/2024 Images Vevey Special Jury Prize, and the Popihuise series was exhibited at the Biennale Images Vevey 2024. Mabheka is represented by Afronova Gallery, Johannesburg. The book won the Author Book Award at Rencontres d’Arles in 2025.
The volume is compact and deliberately shaped. Fifty-six pages carry twenty-three plates at 20.3 by 27.5 cm, in a section-sewn bodonian hardcover with trimmed edges. Concept, editing and sequencing are by Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi, who designed the book with Perrine Serre; the sequencing is therefore an authored act, not an afterthought. French and English texts accompany the plates.
For a collector, the argument is in the construction. Here is a young photographer using the book as the site where memory is rebuilt, with an editor-designer shaping that reconstruction page by page. It documents a practice at its outset and a collaboration worth following; the award record confirms that the work registered immediately, on its own terms.
