ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Sharlene Khan is a South African visual artist and scholar whose multi-media works focus on the socio-political realities of a post-apartheid society and the intersectionality of race-gender-class. She has exhibited in the UK, Italy, France, Germany, South Africa, India, South Korea, Greece (including the Thessaloniki Biennale and the Casablanca Biennale).
Her writings have appeared in Art South Africa, Artthrob, Springerin, Manifesta journal, Contemporary-And, The Conversation Africa, Imbizo: International Journal of African Literary and African Studies, Agenda and The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education. She was a recipient of the Rockefeller Bellagio Visual Arts residency (2009), the Canon Collins/Commonwealth Scholarship (2011), the African Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship (2017), the National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences Award for Visual Arts (2018) and was runner-up winner in the Videokunst Preis Bremen video art award (2015). Her artist books include: What I look like, What I feel like (2009), I Make Art (2017) and When the moon waxes red... Negotiating Subjective Terrain as an 'Inside-Outsider', an 'Outside-Insider' (2019).
She is co-convenor of the annual African Feminisms (Afems) Conference, runs the Art on our Mind Research Project, the bi-weekly Black Feminist Killjoy Reading Group and the Decolonial AestheSis Creative Lab. She holds a PhD (Arts) from Goldsmiths and is Associate Professor at the Department of Fine Arts, Wits School of the Arts, Wits University, Johannesburg.
ARTIST STATEMENT
“Love is never any better than the lover.” (The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison)
The follow-up series to her mother's and grandmother's intimate stories of love and familial violence in When the moon waxes (2009-2022), When the moon wanes (2021-), through an amalgamation of different world myths and literature (The Sun King, Echo and Narcissism, Icarus), follows South African visual artist Sharlene Khan’s own story of unrequited love as a young woman-of-colour coming of age in a democratic post-apartheid society in 1995.
Struggling with her own demons of racial epidermalisation, class and gender, the narrative tells the story of the Tara, Daughter of the Night who falls in love with the Sun King, who woos her, but then leaves her for the Daughter of the Dawn. Tara appeals to her mother, the Moon for help, but, receiving none from the eternals, Tara sews a set of wings to fly up to the Sun. She burns and falls into the ocean, realising that some loves are unattainable, even as they become a part of you.
The artist’s narration is in dialogue with love excerpts from books and poems by Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Roland Barthes, Ama Ata Aidoo, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Charles Dickens, Nawal el Saadawi, Frantz Fanon and Khalil Gibran. This multimedia series employs photography, video and needle work to stitch together women’s love and hurt narratives, that are oft carried deep within their bosoms, sometimes even unto their graves. Weekly during 2022, women students from the Wits University Department of Fine Art (Dumelang Ntlhane, Nono Motlhoki, Saajidah Madhi and Sehlorana Kekana) founded the Love CoLab, discussing their own desires, rejections and unrequited loves, and the group embroidered the set of blue wings that feature in the artwork When the moon wanes.
The Bluest Wings shows not only motifs of love entanglements and wranglings but of sisterly support and warmth.
