Gerald Machona is a Zimbabwean born visual artist, whose work engages with issues of migration, deeply investigating the social terrains where identity, space, social hierarchies and memory are constantly being re-constructed and negotiated.

Ndiri Barman.

“In my work, I have appropriated this masquerade performance strategies, one of which is masking, to negotiate my personal experience as an ‘alien’ living in South Africa. The absence of facial identity also allows these works to discursively engage with the universal experience of foreignness. We are all foreign to someone, somewhere at some point in our lifetime, and the works try to connect with that idea. With global trends of migration and naturalisation, we are now faced with rapidly diversified notions of collective identity, where traditional concepts such as nationhood are no longer simply about where you are born.”

The Protea.

“Material currency is extremely loaded with meaning, especially with regards to the current global discourses of corporations, banking, exchange and economic domination. Simultaneously it functions as a symbol where patriotism and national ideologies can reside. These concepts interest me, and when coupled with my artistic practice, allow for discursive conversations that span issues of identity to class or any socio-economic and political notion.”

Read the full article here: ArtBaseAfrica.org