Musa Kunene

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA

Artist statement

My work archives the spaces in-between connection and disconnection through the lens of cultural practices and ideology, and family. Through archiving these spaces, I explore my childhood memories of complex familial relationships and lineage, and Swazi/Xhosa traditional practices. The images of cow and goat skulls in my drawings depict ritualistic practices such as the initiation of the Sangoma (Swazi/Zulu traditional diviner), that integrate the animal to help the living commune with ancestral spirits. These images of skulls are merged with distorted human figures to show the essential and symbiotic relationships that we have with our natural surroundings in the context of ritual and ancestral worship, as well as the complex and life altering changes that traditional healers experience. My research of shamanistic and initiation practices in Swaziland has allowed me to make images that explore these events through combining different aspects of the initiation process such as purging and sacrifice into one cohesive composition. The concept of family is also depicted in the process of merging printing techniques with drawing. These works use drawings and printed family photographs to archive the images of people in my family, exploring the idea of lineage through a lens of Swazi/Xhosa traditional religion. Through a variety of printmaking process, I continue using family photographs, processing them to create hazy, ghost-like effects which are then layered to become...

Artwork