Left Behind II

"As an artist, whose practice embraces expressions of Ubuntu – an ideology that encompasses compassion and the practice of kinship toward humanity, regardless of perceived differences – my work is deeply rooted within the cultural discourses suggested by NIRIN. Ubuntu originates from Southern Africa and is considered an integral part of society, both pre- and post-colonisation.”

The layered painting style of Mostaff Muchawaya’s portraits emanate both intense dream-like nostalgia and joy. Whereas traditional commissioned portraits often involve a visual dialectic between artist and sitter, Muchawaya’s works are a complex confluence of portraiture and self-portraiture, autobiography and fiction, closely tied to place and memory. His process of painting involves several stages of applying paint and then abrading it, so the materiality of the surface becomes a visual analogy to processes of remembering and recalling, oscillating between familiar, vague and degraded forms and surfaces.