Lesedi Manganye Himaf (b. 2001, Pretoria, South Africa is a Johannesburg-based multidisciplinary conceptual artist whose practice is grounded in material investigation. Working across painting, digital processes, installation, sculpture, and mixed media, he employs woven polypropylene as a primary structural and surface medium.
HIMAF holds a degree in Metallurgy Engineering from the University of Johannesburg (2024). His engineering background informs a materially rigorous, systems-oriented methodology in which materials are tested for strength, repetition, and endurance. Woven polypropylene—an industrial, load-bearing fabric commonly associated with transport and containment—is recontextualised in his practice as both support and subject, operating simultaneously as surface, structure, and conceptual framework.
Central to his practice is Mining Gold, an ongoing body of work that functions as a long-term material system. Within this body of work, woven polypropylene is stretched, layered, stitched, compressed, and digitally reprocessed, allowing its tensile properties and woven syntax to register cycles of accumulation and erosion, beginning and ending, value and disposability. Material behaviour, rather than representation, becomes the primary site of meaning.
His work has been presented at FNB Art Fair through Parliament of the Wild (Art Africa), Contra Joburg, August House Open Studios, and in private pre-show presentations of Mining Gold. His works are held in private collections nationally and internationally.
HIMAF’s practice engages contemporary discourse through material clarity and restraint, positioning woven polypropylene not as a substitute for traditional media, but as a legitimate contemporary medium—capable of carrying memory, labour, and resilience through structure rather than image.
