FNB Joburg Art Fair has announced that Billie Zangewa is the featured artist for the fair’s 2018 installment.
Zangewa works primarily with raw silk offcuts in intricate hand-stitched collages, creating figurative compositions that explore her intersectional identity in the contemporary context and challenge the historical stereotyping, objectification and exploitation of the black female body. Working in a flat, colourful style, she depicts narratives concerned with experience: both personal and universal. These narratives do not make grand gestures or even overt political statements, but rather focus on mundane domestic preoccupations; universal themes connecting us to each other. Almost always the protagonist in her works, Zangewa becomes a heroine whose daily life is revealed through the scenes she illustrates.
I’m thrilled to be selected as this year’s featured artist for the FNB JoburgArtFair. It’s a great honour and I’m proud to be in the company of the other artists chosen before me. Sincere thanks to FNB, Artlogic and my gallery, blank projects, for their support.
-Billie Zangewa, 2018
Born in 1973 in Blantyre, Malawi, Zangewa has exhibited extensively at institutions both locally and internationally, including at the MASS MoCA (2017), Stedelijk Museum (2017), Studio Museum Harlem (2016), Iziko South African National Gallery (2016), Johannesburg Art Gallery (2016), Guggenheim Bilbao (2015), WIELS (2015), La Maison Rouge (2013) and the Menil Collection (2012). Her work is represented in several notable private and public collections, including the Tate Modern, Stedelijk Museum and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art collections.
Zangewa lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.
More information on Zangewa can be found via blank projects here.
For more information visit www.fnbjoburgartfair.co.za.
FNB JoburgArtFair
6 – 9 September, 2018
Sandton Convention Center
