D. M. Terblanche
South Africa
D. M. Terblanche is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist working primarily in photography. Their practice focuses on narrative documentary and portraiture, drawing from storytelling traditions across media to explore both personal and constructed realities. They began with cellphone self-portraits, developing a preference for analog processes while centering portraiture as an intimate space for self-reflection and confronting the past.
Photography serves Terblanche as both personal and political, exploring queer identities and the disquiet following a late autism diagnosis. Their work channels vulnerability into imagery between introspection and distortion, addressing trauma and uncertainty with raw emotional honesty.
Instagram• SERIES •
Grim
Grim is an allegory, inspired by long walks through the Ahr Valley and rural West Germany. Told from the perspective of a spine, it unfolds like a fable: a solitary child lives in a cold, windswept house on a hill above a forest filled with strange, unreal beings whose ways do not abide by human logic. The forest calls to her softly at first, then ceaselessly, until isolation and longing drive her into its depths.There she meets a god who offers a blessed life in her next life, in exchange for her spine.
The child agrees, and the god plucks her spine and plants it in the earth. Where blood meets foliage, the world begins again. The faces, creatures, and landscapes that emerge are the dream her spine dreams as it takes root, stretching through lives and reincarnations.
