Shalom Mushwana: Lossy Body I, 69 cm x80 cm, mixed media on 160gsm Fabriano
This drawing is a response to the inter-determinacy of identity. Focused around the varying loci that inform contemporary South African identities, this amorphous body aims to evoke the isolationist paradigm we live through, where isolated curatorial environments allow individuals to pick and choose, to stitch and in some sense retrofit ones self to the social realms that one chooses to reside within. These algorithmic shifts, that present an organized disorder, inspire the mechanical line work, that in one sense gives shape to traditionally flat spaces, but also intersects, divides and disrupts the order of the body and the way it can be fashioned to ones will.
This drawing, in its fragmentary nature, speaks to a disrupted sense of collective memory: a lack of place within a fundamentally globalized world. The porousness of national identity and of collective memory are expressed through this fragmentary body, rendered through different mediums to speak to the varying fidelities that we engage with other bodies. The varying sites through which we consume, re-consume and regurgitate ideas around the body have within myself created a warped sense of self, a self in pieces, a self that is inherently bound to the collective memory of south Africa, but free to exist as a hybrid, amorphous and unfixed presence throughout digital and physical realms of existence.
Born in Makhanda (1994) South Africa, Shalom Mushwana is a multi-disciplinary artist using digital imagery as key source in documenting and reimagining visual narratives and histories within contemporary South Africa. Studying towards a bachelor’s degree in Visual Art at the University of Johannesburg, Shalom is in the process of amalgamating traditional mediums such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and photography with contemporary thoughts and around information, communication and the technologies there-of.