Dumile Feni’s abundant talent is amply demonstrated in this powerful drawing where he conveys intense psychic states through minimal means. His command of the pen and ink medium is unparalleled, with crisp clean lines delineating a contorted figure whose elongated limbs and compressed torso suggest both literal confinement and internal freneticism. The dynamism of his mark-making is heightened by the coloured pen and ink – incredibly rare in his oeuvre as Feni’s palette was overwhelmingly limited to monotones.

Within Feni’s practice, images of prisoners, refugees, and burdened figures recur as metaphors for broader conditions of unfreedom. Created in the time that he lived in London, and just two years before the Soweto Uprising, this work speaks to the pervasive climate of surveillance, detention, and exile facing Black South Africans in the early 1970s. Yet the figure is not stripped of agency; the intensity of the gaze, the muscular tension, and the almost spiritual aura around the head suggest an inner life that cannot be fully contained. Feni’s prisoner resonates with contemporary concerns about mass incarceration, migration and state violence, both in South Africa and globally. Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, this drawing illustrates the “between” of the exhibition’s title: the body is recognisable, but its distortions push it into a more symbolic register where suffering and resilience become universalised without losing their specific historical charge.