Hannalie Taute

Hannalie Taute (b. 1977) is a multidisciplinary South African artist known for her bold, tactile explorations of material, identity, and narrative. Her practice is driven by a fascination with domestic mythology and the uneasy humour that arises when sentimentality begins to fray. Working primarily with repurposed rubber inner tubes and hand-stitched embroidery, Taute creates sculptural and wall-based works that collide the industrial with the intimate. In her hands, rubber becomes skin, armour, and theatre; embroidery becomes a subversive mark-making language that wounds, repairs, and rewrites.

Taute completed a National Higher Diploma in Fine Art at PE Technikon (now Nelson Mandela University) in 2000. She held her debut solo exhibition, Siembamba – let’s play pretend, at João Ferreira Gallery in 2004, and has since exhibited widely across South Africa and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include presentations at Oliewenhuis Art Museum, Bloemfontein (2025), MContemporary in Sydney, and Knysna Fine Art (2024).

Her work has been featured at major art fairs including Sydney Contemporary (2022, 2024, 2025), Positions Berlin (2022), AKAA Art Fair, Paris (2022), and Latitudes Art Fair with Candice Berman Gallery. She received the Kanna Award for Best Visual Art Production at the KKNK Arts Festival in 2014 for Rubber Ever After, and represented South Africa at the Rijswijk Textile Biennale in the Netherlands in 2017.

Her work is held in numerous private and public collections, including the UNISA Art Collection. She lives and works in Riversdale, at the foot of the Sleeping Beauty mountain range in the Western Cape.

Hannalie Taute is represented by Berman Contemporary.

Ever since our prehistoric ancestors captured the images of the world around them onto rock surfaces, we have been enthralled by images. Today, we can scarcely bring ourselves to throw away old photographs of loved ones. Such is our attachment to the quasi-voodoo action that what we do when we change the photos somehow affects the person. I shatter this self-imposed taboo by defacing enlarged vintage photographs with mask-like embroidered rubber inlays, imbuing the work with notions of identity in terms of culture, heritage and society.

Besides masks I also add embroidered rubber inlays of flowers and animals, inspired by local fauna and flora.
In my works masks are perfect metaphors for how we protect ourselves from the discomfort of vulnerability. Masks make us feel safer even when they become suffocating. Another paradox can be found in the material I use. The industrial masculine rubber, and the feminine cotton thread. There has been much written and discussed around embroidery focusing on the ‘feminist’ aspect and craft-versus-art debate. Within both my stitching technique and the material onto which I embroider rather ‘imperfectly’, I express my interest in the dysfunctional aspect of embroidery.

While many of the photographs I use were captured locally, sourced from flea markets or gifted by family and friends, by then adding embroidered rubber masks from different cultures feels to me like a re-stitching of a ‘historical narrative’. From time to time the text used as titles, are like the photographs- found and reconfigured and appropriated as a narrative. I am interested how by simply changing the text underneath an image you can radically alter the image’s message.