Felix Shumba
b.1989, Zimbabwe
link to Sharjah Biennial 15

 Felix Shumba is a self-taught visual artist living in Masvingo, Zimbabwe. Shumba explores social trauma in an attempt to interrogate the ways in which history is constructed. 

Shumba 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.

Shumba uses art as a mode of revealing the historical masks of violence and their bearing on material realities of blackness, central to Shumba’s work is constant search, probing and questioning of what is at stake, what is hidden, and what trumps the possibility of freedom.













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