BIOGRAPHY
Musa N. Nxumalo was born in 1986 in Soweto and currently lives and works in Johannesburg. He received his introduction to photography at the Market Photo Workshop with Sabelo Mlangeni and the late Thabiso Sekgala, who are often associated with the new generation of contemporary South African photographers. Nxumalo completed the Foundation and Intermediate Courses at Market Photo Workshop between 2006 and 2008 and has since participated in several workshops and master classes. In 2015, he was nominated for the prestigious First Book Award. Other awards include the Edward Ruiz Mentorship in 2008, first prize in Visual Art for the Impact Awards in 2010, and the Mail & Guardian 200 Young South Africans in 2010.
In 2020, Nxumalo was selected to participate in NIRIN, the 22nd Sydney Biennale, curated by Brook Andrews in Sydney, Australia. In 2019, his work was included in the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair at Somerset House in London, as well as the group exhibition Crossing Night: Regional Identities x Global Context at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, USA. He also presented work at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair in Cape Town, South Africa. Further notable exhibitions include Africa State of Mind at the Impressions Gallery in Bradford, UK, before traveling to the Museum of African Diaspora in San Francisco, USA, and the Royal West England Academy in Bristol, UK. He also participated in Night Fever: Designing Club Culture 1960 – Today at Adam – the Brussels Design Museum in Brussels, Belgium.
In 2018, Nxumalo was selected to take part in the 11th edition of Rencontres de Bamako, entitled Afrotopia, curated by Marie-Ann Yemsi in Bamako, Mali. In 2017, he participated in Art/Afrique, le nouvel atelier at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, France. His project Peregrinate was shown across the African continent, including Lagos, Abidjan, Bamako, and Nairobi, in 2015 and 2016. In 2015, he was included in Next Generation at the Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Queens College, New York. Other exhibitions include Urban Scenographies as part of the By Night Festival in Saint-Denis, Reunion, where he was a resident artist; Space Between Us in Germany; My Joburg at Maison Rouge Gallery in Paris, all in 2013; and For Those Who Live In It in the Netherlands in 2010.
Between 2008 and 2016, Nxumalo produced two bodies of work that received critical recognition: Alternative Kidz(2009) and In/Glorious (2012). The latter formed part of his 2015 solo exhibition, In Search Of…, which was first shown in Stellenbosch, South Africa, and thereafter at the Goethe Institute in Johannesburg. He later presented a second solo exhibition, 16 Shots, in Johannesburg in 2017. His project The Anthology of Youth (2016) was shown in part at the FNB Joburg Art Fair 2016 and in UPSTART/STARTUP in Johannesburg. In 2018, he exhibited 16 Shots, a selection from The Anthology of Youth, in Johannesburg.
Selected collections include the IZIKO South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa; the Pigozzi Collection in Geneva, Switzerland; and the Royal Portfolio Collection, South Africa.
Awards & Recognitions:
2008: Edward Ruiz Mentorship Award, Johannesburg, South Africa.
2009: MTN CIT:Y Awards 2nd Prize – Visual Art Category, Johannesburg, South Africa.
2010: ImpACT Award 1st Prize – Visual Art Category, The Arts & Culture Trust, South Africa.
2010: Mai & Guardian 200 Young South Africans.
2012: Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund Nominee, New York City, USA.
2011: 11 Joopswart Masterclass Nominee, World Press Photo, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
2013: GD4PHOTOART International Competition Nominee for Urban Scenographies, By Night Festival, Reunion Island.
2015: First Book Award – Finalist, London, UK.
2014: Design Thinking in Interdisciplinary Arts Practice, iThuba Arts Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa.
Selected Solo Exhibitions:
2009: Alternative-Kidz [Travelling Exhibition], Market Photo Workshop, Johannesburg, South Africa; Alternative-Kidz [Travelling Exhibition], National School Of Arts, Johannesburg, South Africa; Alternative-Kidz [Travelling Exhibition], Stevenson Gallery (Side Gallery Project), Cape Town, South Africa.
2011: Musa Nxumalo, Afronova Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa.
2015: In Search Of… [Travelling Exhibition], Goethe-Institut, Johannesburg; SMAC Gallery, Stellenbosch, South Africa.
2017: 16 Shots, SMAC Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa.
2020: We Are Running Out Of Hashtags!, SMAC Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa.
Selected Group Exhibitions:
2010: …For Those Who Live In It, Mu Project Space, Eindhoven, Netherlands.
2011: The Night Show, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa.
2012: Shoe Shop Project, Goethe-Institut, Johannesburg, South Africa; As Seen On Tv, Sibisi Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa.
2013: My Joburg, Maison Rouge Gallery, Paris, France; Urban Scenographies, By Night Festival, Reunion Island; Space Between Us, ifa-Galerie, Berlin, Germany; Shoot To Kill, Kalashnikov Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa.
2014: Short Change, Market Photo Workshop Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa; Peregrinate, FNB Joburg Art Fair (Goethe-Institut), Sandton Convention Centre, Johannesburg, South Africa; 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair (Afronova Gallery), London, UK.
2015: On Fire: Notions of Community in Post-Apartheid South Africa, curated by Manuel Osterholt, Grimmuseum, Berlin, Germany; FNB Joburg Art Fair (SMAC Gallery), Sandton Convention Centre, Johannesburg, South Africa; Peregrinate [Travelling Exhibition], Goethe-Institut, Cote D’Ivoire; Next Generation: Emerging Photographers from South Africa, Queens College, New York City, USA; Cape Town Art Fair (SMAC Gallery), The Avenue, V&A Waterfront, Cape Town, South Africa.
2016: Close to Home: New Photography from Africa, The Walther Collection – Project Space, New York City, USA; Peregrinate [Travelling Exhibition], Goethe-Institut, Nairobi, Kenya; Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Lagos, Nigeria; FNB Joburg Art Fair (SMAC Gallery), Sandton Convention Centre, Johannesburg, South Africa; Upstart/Startup, SMAC Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa.
2017: Platform Africa, Apeture Summer Issue Launch, 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair, New York City, USA; Être là, South Africa, a contemporary art scene, Art/Afrique, le nouvel atelier, Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris, France; Peregrinate [Travelling Exhibition], The Goethe Institut, Yaounde, Cameroon; Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo.
2018: Urban Gaze, Keys Art Mile Atrium, Johannesburg, South Africa; Night Fever: Designing Club Culture 1960 – Today, Adam – Brussels Design Museum, Brussels, Belgium; FNB Joburg Art Fair (Bad Paper), Sandton Convention Centre, Johannesburg, South Africa; RMB Turbine Art Fair, Turbine Hall, Johannesburg, South Africa; 16 Shots (selection from The Anthology of Youth), SMAC Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa.
2019: Crossing Night: Regional Identities x Global Context, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit, USA; 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair (SMAC Gallery), Somerset House, London, UK; Africa State of Mind [Travelling Exhibition], Impressions Gallery, Bradford, UK; Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco, USA; Royal West England Academy, Bristol, UK; Night Fever: Designing Club Culture 1960 – Today, Adam – Brussels Design Museum, Brussels, Belgium.
2020: NIRIN – 22nd Biennale of Sydney, Art Gallery of NSW; Artspace; Campbelltown Arts Centre; Cockatoo Island; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia; The National Art School, Sydney, Australia; Investec Cape Town Art Fair, Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC), Cape Town, South Africa.
Selected Commissions:
2013–2014: Roodepoort Exhibition Project, Public Affairs Research Institute, South Africa.
2014: Atlantic Philanthropies Project, Magnum Foundation, New York City, USA.
Collections:
Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa; The Silo Hotel Collection, Cape Town, South Africa; Pigozzi Collection, Geneva, Switzerland; Genop Collection, Johannesburg, South Africa; Leridon Collection, Paris, France; Several private collections.
Discover a new body of work by photographer, Musa N. Nxumalo; a collection of portraits fashioned in the form of flags and pennants. These new photographic works are an expansion and refinement of ideas Nxumalo began exploring around 2020; the work stretches Nxumalo’s interest in alternative ways of presenting his photographs, along with his long conceptual explosions around the complexities of the contemporary condition on black boyhood as it struggles to matures into manhood.
Nxumalo continues to hold up images of young black men marred by, and wrestling with how they are seen and shaped by the biases of the popular gaze. Just as he did with earlier work, Nxumalo presents us with select portraits of young black men standing semi–nude with only their sagging pants on, an occasional hat, but no shirts.
He insists on composition and exposure of meaningful skin and flesh. It’s at once code of performed bravado as it is a mark of unguarded vulnerability. The picture’s symbolic energy carries resonance with jailhouse mugshots in one part, while also flagging the visual grammar of pop cultural iconography with its propensity to fatishize black male figures like these.
Nxumalo, is a photographer who deals in ideas well articulated by African-American academic of black male studies, Tommy Curry who has written about the need for a genre study of “black male death and dying”; To the extent that Nxumalo’s flags sign post an invitation for viewers to become “interested in the process of what it means to lose one’s life in the course of living”. This is to say, what it means to lose one’s humanity by being reduced, reified into a shorthand symbol for the specific missteps or failures in one’s life – to be made a meme and reduced to a flag.
If we begin with Indian writer, Arundhati Roy’s instructive cynical view of flags as bits of colored cloth that power uses first to shrink-wrap people’s minds; then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead, we find fitting convergence for Nxumalo’s metaphor with Curry’s call to a humanising ethical and critical engagement. One way to understand Nxumalo’s governing trope, is by observing the way it implicates the reductive speak of the social media age to emphasise his conceptual concerns. But first, we need to attend to some of the building blocks of his discourse. The flag, as a symbol along with its myriad uses, the functions of photography in regimes of surveillance, and ideas black manhood wrestling to articulate itself in an increasingly misandrist world burdened with a heritage of anti-blackness.
The flag, and its function in the heraldic codes across the world, is created and deployed to mean and to signal. The flag is shorthand for power’s acquisitive capacity. The flag, like border lines, is an instrument by which power delineates included persons and excluded subjects. To be under a flag also means to be subject to its authority, and therefore covered by the meanings it signals.
In social media speak, the flag functions with a comparable reductive shorthand; often deployed accompanied by phrases describing tropes or behavior by which individuals should be flagged as suspicious, avoided, or excluded; and even marked for potential cancellation.
“If he listens to podcasts about high value and alpha this and that… #RedFlag” or “if he grew up in Voslo and drives a GTI… #RedFlag”
In this latest iteration of his work on flags, Nxumalo is also exploring the ways in which shared effort is a kind of performative identity. For instance, he has brought in Anthony Kobane of Sir Anthony Jeans co to share in the efforts to realize the work.. This convergence is not without meaning. For instance, it also codes the symbolic and cultural history of denim as a fabric associated with labour and work.
The laborious process of stitching and patching in the production process is invoked as code for the street vernacular of township brotherhood and the constant need work or produce; Hence to the standard heraldic greeting phrase: ng’sa pesha-pesha, or I am still patching things together.
This collaboration has evolved Nxumalos form from the flag as banner to something closer to pennants. The work carries his portraits on one side and quotes and pieces of lyrics by hyper masculine black musicians. Fela Kuti, Jay-Z, Nas and others whose creative practices have emerged over the years as examples of black men publicly wrestling with the how to form themselves into healthy functioning beings; this while also demanding exceptional sexiness, authentic street hard-to-unfuck-with-money-getters, vulnerability romantics at the same time. Hence, to be a young black male in Nxumalo’s lens is also about wrestling with a being in a world that keeps sending you mixed messages and crossed flags. — Percy Mabandu