Tomorrows/Today
Shamilla Aasha
Born 1977 Hwange, Zimbabwe
Lives and works in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe
Shamilla Aasha is a practicing artist and teacher of art and design. After many years of working in painting and mixed media, in 2018 Aasha re- engage with her love of textiles through exploration of her multi cultural background as a Shona and Indian woman living in Matabeleland region of Zimbabwe. Developing complex works addressing issues related to merging cultures and traditional practices and how they influence identity, spirituality and social status for herself and other women in her community. Aasha’s works defy attempts at categorisation, incorporating weaving, tapestry as well as engaging with the idea and history of painting. They emerge as soft sculptures, wall-hangings made from found objects as well abstract embroideries. She describes them as sacred objects, a fitting metaphor for her narratives. This metaphor is further expanded on, as she uses sewing patterns, fabric and stitching. This process allows her to create new patterns from the old and with each layer creating a palmistry language. Shamilla has participated in numerous exhibitions locally regionally and internationally. She is currently part of an ongoing, regional collaborative project, which is interrogating the participation of women in land redistribution in Southern Africa.
In addition to artistic practice, Shamilla also continues to nurture creativity minds through her trust- Asha Children’s Trust, an organisation devoted to creating safe spaces for young creatives grow and thrive outside the formal education sector.
Recent exhibitions
2021: Breathing Time, Solo exhibition. First Floor Gallery, Victoria Falls
2021: Nyika/Ilizwe/Nation Collective Exhibition, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Bulawayo
2019: Womens’ Exhibition -Better Balance, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare.
2019: PPC Imaginarium, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare Recipient of Commendation in Jewellery Category
2018: BUKA group Exhibition -The Suttie Art Space-Aberdeen, Harare contemporary, First Circle Gallery, Nairobi, Kenya
Seamless
The textile-based work of Shamilla Aasha (Zimbabwe, 1977), who firstly began her artistic career as a painter, unfolds from her search around notions of resilience and spirituality and her interest in the invisible threads that weave affective relationships in society. Aasha’s cultural experience as a Shona and an Indian identifying woman, living in the Matabeleland region of Zimbabwe, is made present in her work through the patient and laborious manual practice of abstract sewing, stitching and embroidering, which reflects on the meshing of different cultural practices and spiritual forms inherited from the past and syncretized into the present.
Aasha’s softly-shaped, wall-hanging tapestries convey a visual tension between delicacy and potency, spirituality and materiality. They are, according to the artist, sacred objects that emerge through the gesture of knitting together existing patterns to generate new shapes, almost like a divination practice from which the future unfolds.
Her project for In and Out of Time is titled Seamless, which represents a smooth yet significant continuation of her on-going exploration of emotional intimacy and spirituality. The series of tapestries included in this project are small unstretched canvases on which the artist has sewed patterns, different fabrics and threads to create a textured organism, which seems to suggest the shapes of undecipherable divine maps, that contain secret and impossible ways to timeless love.
In fact, according to the artist, “Seamless addresses the spaces that exist between falling in and out of love with someone, the shifting between emotional proximity and emotional distance in a romantic relationship.” As the reverse of the act of falling in love, we can experience a sense of deep estrangement toward the one we used to feel love for, the scary feeling of un-recognizing the other, often confining them away from the sphere of familiarity. Through her work, Shamilla Aasha poses the questions of the fading of the sentimental euphoria that throws us out of the cosmology of the mythical time of love - a time that is known to be eternal, primordial, and regenerative. To fall out of love might mean to experience time as a departure, as a movement away from what used to be our centre, toward the unhearting of new ontologies of the self and the other.
Text by Natasha Becker and Mariella Franzoni
The textile-based work of Shamilla Aasha (Zimbabwe, 1977), who firstly began her artistic career as a painter, unfolds from her search around notions of resilience and spirituality and her interest in the invisible threads that weave affective relationships in society. Aasha’s cultural experience as a Shona and an Indian identifying woman, living in the Matabeleland region of Zimbabwe, is made present in her work through the patient and laborious manual practice of abstract sewing, stitching and embroidering, which reflects on the meshing of different cultural practices and spiritual forms inherited from the past and syncretized into the present.
Aasha’s softly-shaped, wall-hanging tapestries convey a visual tension between delicacy and potency, spirituality and materiality. They are, according to the artist, sacred objects that emerge through the gesture of knitting together existing patterns to generate new shapes, almost like a divination practice from which the future unfolds.
Her project for In and Out of Time is titled Seamless, which represents a smooth yet significant continuation of her on-going exploration of emotional intimacy and spirituality. The series of tapestries included in this project are small unstretched canvases on which the artist has sewed patterns, different fabrics and threads to create a textured organism, which seems to suggest the shapes of undecipherable divine maps, that contain secret and impossible ways to timeless love.
In fact, according to the artist, “Seamless addresses the spaces that exist between falling in and out of love with someone, the shifting between emotional proximity and emotional distance in a romantic relationship.” As the reverse of the act of falling in love, we can experience a sense of deep estrangement toward the one we used to feel love for, the scary feeling of un-recognizing the other, often confining them away from the sphere of familiarity. Through her work, Shamilla Aasha poses the questions of the fading of the sentimental euphoria that throws us out of the cosmology of the mythical time of love - a time that is known to be eternal, primordial, and regenerative. To fall out of love might mean to experience time as a departure, as a movement away from what used to be our centre, toward the unhearting of new ontologies of the self and the other.
Text by Natasha Becker and Mariella Franzoni
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