Kenneth Bale’s Blue Tapestry is not standing still. From Mokolodi to Maun and now Gaborone, the evolving art project follows memory, movement and belonging using one colour to ask a very big question: who is Botswana becoming?
GOSEGO MOTSUMI
Botswana has spent six decades becoming a nation. Visual artist Kenneth Bale wants to know what happens when that becoming is put on canvas and painted blue.
On Friday, 18 September, Blue Tapestry — Chapter III: Where Memory, Movement and Belonging Meet arrives at Alliance Française de Gaborone, turning Independence Month into a conversation about identity rather than a history lesson.
BLUE IS THE THREAD
Bale’s multidisciplinary project began with Chapter I, Unrooted, at Mokolodi Nature Reserve, where 18 paintings rendered entirely in shades of blue explored belonging, migration and becoming against Botswana’s natural landscape.
Chapter II moved to Maun, a place defined by ecological movement, tourism and cultural exchange. Now Gaborone becomes the next stop and the canvas gets bigger.
Painting is only part of the story. Storytelling, literature, installation and dialogue converge in Chapter III, transforming the exhibition into what Bale describes as a living archive: a project that changes with every place and community it encounters.
MORE THAN A COLOUR
Here, blue refuses to stay in the paint tube.
It becomes water, memory, healing, migration and hope. During Botswana’s Independence Month, it also taps into national identity, connecting with the prominence of blue in leteisi and the cultural inheritance carried through generations.
That makes Blue Tapestry less about looking backwards and more about examining what comes next.
At its centre is an intentionally uncomfortable question: “How do nations, like people, continually become?”
It is a question without a neat museum-label answer. Instead, Bale’s work invites viewers to sit with the uncertainty to consider where Botswana has come from, what it carries and what it might still become.
For an Independence celebration, that feels refreshingly alive.
The exhibition opens at 5:30pm. Entry is free, with a welcome drink on arrival.