Printed Matters

Siwa Mgoboza’s Art Plays Off The Strength Of A South African Print Staple, Shweshwe.

- Mary Corrigall

Supporters of the rise of homebrewed South African design in the early 2000s may experience a flashback when they encounter Siwa Mgoboza’s art. This is largely due to his extensive use of shweshwe in his collages, a printed cotton that was the go-to fabric during the Afro-chic movement, when Western designers were intent on aligning their fashion with African aesthetics.

In the hands of the young Capetonian artist, Afro chic has been reinvented and transformed into a concept he calls Africadia. In some ways, it continues the essence of the sentiment that drove Afro chic in that his brightly collaged artworks are intended to evoke a utopian African condition, where identity is no longer defined along racial, class, religious or gender lines. His collages are dense and complex, existing somewhere between figurative art and abstraction, and it is impossible to immediately identify the figures or settings in his work. ‘I am trying to represent a frantic state of being; there is no telling what is happening on what level. I want the viewer to be stressed. Is it fabric, is it a photograph?’ says Mgoboza.