South Africa
Zama Mwandla is a Johannesburg-based artist working in painting and sculpture. Her work is informed by a radical feminist perspective, airing violent anti-masculine fantasies and imagining vengeance for the countless victims of gender-based violence in South Africa. Her paintings introduce a panoply of human-animal hybrids which reappear across different works, each character associated with particular meanings or roles.
Influenced by an early love of Japanese anime, Mwandla paints overwhelming surrealistic scenes that are highly codified and gendered. Through her bold re-tellings of the violence, rumination, psychopathic imagination, rage and grievance experienced by rape victims, she empathises with her characters and invites the viewer to do the same. In doing so, she creates a space for trauma, violence and anger to be observed and explored without destructive real world repercussions.
Mwandla graduated from Wits University in Johannesburg with a BA Fine Arts (Hons) in 2021, achieving multiple awards during her studies under the tutelage of artist and scholar Professor Sharlene Khan. In 2022 she participated in the exhibition Fresh Voices, at Guns & Rain, and in 2023 she was awarded a residency at the Schütz Museum in Engelhartszell, Austria.
You can view Mwandla’s debut group exhibition with Guns & Rain in the 2022 Fresh Voices catalogue.
Man Obsolete: Ambush
2021 Oil and Acrylic on canvas 121.9 x 64.6 cm
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