Mawande Ka Zenzile
The Problem We Didn't Create
'Primarily in my work, I draw attention to my heritage as a conceptual and a contextual frame of reference for my artistic practices. But my work is also a fusion of references and motifs from different sources including Western art history, popular culture, literature and my personal experience of the world. Through my work, I engage politics, memory, violence, history, colonial legacies, and the notions of space and time. I constantly aim to negate stereotypes imposed on my work. Each and every artistic process I engage with is a continuous deconstruction of the ideologies and limitations I find imposed on me by the world.'
So writes Mawande Ka Zenzile in his essay accompanying this catalogue which encompasses a consistent body of work ranging from 2010 to his most recent solo exhibition, Statecraft, at Stevenson, Cape Town. Ka Zenzile works in painting - combining cow dung and earth with oil paint - as well as sculpture, installation and video to explore themes about the state, morality, death, power, violence and politics. Ka Zenzile provides the viewer with an opportunity to see familiar images from a different perspective, by taking them out of their usual contexts and assembling them in conversation with each other.
Published by Stevenson | Catalogue 83, May 2015
Softcover, 80 pages | Unavailable
