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In Collection: Nomusa Makhubu, Comparison I, 2013 in Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth USA.

 

 

 

 

About:

Mothers Breast Feeding, 2013.

Born 1984. Lives and works in Cape Town
Makhubu has established herself as one of the new generation of lens based artists to explore issues of identity, culture, land, rights, economy and religion. Her acclaimed series, Self-Portrait Project alludes to the continued alienation and estrangement in an era where the focus is inclined toward self and individual identity as opposed to collective and communal life. One of the canonical meanings that Achille Mbembe (2002: 241) argues can be attributed to slavery and colonialism (as well as Apartheid) is dispossession, a process in which juridical and economic procedures have led to material expropriation. Makhubu’s latest series The Flood has received deserved critical acclaim. It marks a departure from her previous work, shifting from the personal to the public.

Queen, 2007-2013.

In November 2013, she was selected as one of fourteen female photographers from around the world invited to participate in the Semiha Es – Women Photographers International Symposium, in Istanbul, Turkey. Her paper, The Power and Terror of the Enactment of Collective Memory in Performative Photographycommented directly on her own work, particularly the Self Portrait Project series.

Artist statement:

Initially, I began with finding the spaces between people and myself that precipitated certain levels of discomfort because of categories and stereo-types that came easily.

Then I realised how rich a context South Africa is. Its history is marked by the social and cultural dynamics that bypass boundaries while still recognising if not emphasizing boundaries.

Still Binding, 2013.

It is a country in a phase that is the most critical and most interesting in the ways that it deals with creating nationalism while emphasizing difference in identities. Identity, culture, land, rights, economy, religion and more are continuously re-appropriated and claimed and re-claimed.

It is this sense of ownership, or the loss of, that I would still like to explore further.
What defined individuals by culture becomes a fashionable statement and a sold identity in the global territory of capitalism.

The Gaze, 2013.

Courtesy: Erdmann Contemporary Cape Town