For want of a horse, a button was lost

Tiwani Contemporary's first In Focus introduction this year features, Felix Shumba: 'For want of a horse, a button was lost'. Shumba has created an installation of charcoal drawings influenced by the evidential and documentary values of photography, particularly referencing 19th century daguerreotype plates and the work of American photojournalist J. Ross Bauman's 1978 Pulitzer Prize winning sequence of photographs following the Grey's Scouts, a Rhodesian mounted infantry and their brutal treatment of suspected guerrillas as part of inland security activity. Featuring a dystopian fiction that imagines a time-traveling military corps, the Salt Corps agents, activating a revisitation and surveyance of...

Portrait of Felix Shumba. Photo: Kemang Wa Lehulere

Felix Shumba (b.1989,Zimbabwe) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses drawing, painting, video, text, and installation work. His work attempts at deconstructing spaces (real or imagined)—which he describes as Fold Fields Space (FFS). These are sites generally characterized and haunted by death, trauma, tension, restraint, psychic terror, ecological damage and use o...

Felix Shumba (b.1989,Zimbabwe) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses drawing, painting, video, text, and installation work. His work attempts at deconstructing spaces (real or imagined)—which he describes as Fold Fields Space (FFS). These are sites generally characterized and haunted by death, trauma, tension, restraint, psychic terror, ecological damage and use of the military as an apparatus of control.

Using various stylistic modes of representation, such as masking and concealment, Shumba engages the illusory, if performative, rituals of power that have sustained regimes of racial capitalist extraction. By deploying a dystopian imagery of the postcolony—culled from archival and media sources on settler-colonial Rhodesia—FFS brings the viewer closer to understanding contemporary predicaments in Zimbabwe.