Tschabalala Self

Tschabalala Self’s presentation inaugurates a new series of exhibitions entitled RESPONSES. The series attempts to bring established contemporary artists into dialogue with the program presented with a show operating as a gesture.

Self’s powerful works combine fabric collage, printmaking, and painting into a distinctive visual language that brings the lived realities of contemporary Black life to the fore. The compositions she develops create spaces in which her two-dimensional figures seem to live and breathe. Her practice moves between artistic and craft-based traditions, addressing questions of identity, self-determination, and collective memory.

Self’s work enters into an expanded dialogue with the themes that shape the practices of Edwards and Mekondjo: the material and symbolic conditions of Black life across the African and American continents; the entangled cultural legacies of colonialism, slavery, the plantation and equally the resistances that emerged; through political movements and currents, from the Civil Rights Movement to more recently, Black Lives Matter.