Bubblegum Club

Tag: womanhood

  • Art director and photographer Lubabetu Abubakar creates honest, bold images

    Art director and photographer Lubabetu Abubakar creates honest, bold images

    Lubabetu Abubakar aka Lubee Abubakar studied law, but has been making the transition to a full-time photographer and art director. With a focus on fashion, she illuminates the people she photographs with her delicate approach to capturing each image. She has been presented as one of the photographers bringing attention to her home country, Nigeria, with her participation in the 2017 LagosPhoto Festival.

    With her transition to a full-time creative practice Abubakar allows herself to experiment while finding a way to create a signature in her imagery. She plays with colour in bold, and sometimes subtle ways, forming a visual language that draws the viewer in and engenders a curiosity around the people in her photographs. The models in her images often have an intense engagement with the camera, looking directly and confidently at the viewer. However, Abubakar softens this intensity, making their stares come across more inviting than intimidating.

    One of Abubakar’s more personal projects, a series titled ‘Ojoro‘, explores themes related to womanhood and welcoming a woman into adulthood. This series is accompanied by a text that intimately expresses what a woman feels when on her period. The connection between the images and text shares with audiences an honesty and rawness that provokes emotive responses.

    The presentation of her work online appears as a puzzle, with each photograph and gif on her home page pointing to different aspects of her work. Viewers can see commercial work alongside images that take on a more documentary style, showing a diversity of work.

    Check out Abubakar website to keep up with her work.

  • Maxim Vakhovskiy – Celebrating the raw beauty women of colour possess through photography

    Maxim Vakhovskiy – Celebrating the raw beauty women of colour possess through photography

    Maxim Vakhovskiy is a self-taught photographer based in Charlotte, North Carolina (USA). Growing up in Kiev, Ukraine, her family immigrated to the United States when she was 13 years old. Her father’s hobbyist photography instilled a passion for the art form within her.

    “He would create a makeshift darkroom in the small bathroom of our house. I sat with him watching the images emerge on paper under red light. It was one of my favourite things to do and I think that’s when the passion for photography, or at least a small dormant seed, was planted.” – on her father’s photographic practice and influence.

    Maxim tells me in our email interview that the process of finding herself in the photographic landscape was extensive. Initially studying Psychology and Philosophy she switched over to graphic design and concluded with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. It was during her formal training that she rekindled her friendship with the medium of the lens.

    After graduation, Maxim began working at MODE (a branding agency in Charlotte, North Carolina) as a graphic designer. Later she inhabited the part of an art director and transitioned into photography.

    Central to Maxim’s personal practice is portraiture through which she aims to emphasize the raw beauty of the people she photographs. Her work acts as a celebration of womanhood, the human body and women of colour.

    Her work generally plays out within a studio set up and she explains that the reason for this is because of the control that the studio space lends to her. She elaborates on this point by stating that her obsession with precise lighting can be satisfied within the studio space. Another aspect that draws her to the studio is its privacy as she is drawn to nude portraiture. Within the studio the people she photographs can feel more at ease.

    “I think of it as a love affair. I’m in love with my craft and fall a little bit in love with everyone I photograph. To me, it’s one of the few ways to capture a bit of someone’s essence. I focus on visual simplicity that evokes complexity. My work is an exercise of trust and untraditional ideals beauty basked in classic light.”

    Muted tonal backdrops, soft becoming lighting, simplified backgrounds and beautiful women of colour act together to unify Maxim’s vision. With her work, she elevates the beauty of women of colour, womanhood and the human body. Her simplified backgrounds make her work more arresting as attention is brought to the people that she photographs.

  • The use of fabric in art for preservation, reflection and identity

    The use of fabric in art for preservation, reflection and identity

    Throughout the history of art, artists have appreciated the versatility that fabric possesses. Viewed as clothing, skin and a source of identity, it can be manipulated and molded into an object (or subject) with conceptual depth. It allows for the creation of soft sculptures, or be used as aids in performance, but does not deny artists the ability to project a sense of hardness, scale or visual weight. Textiles can also be used as a presentation of and reflection on colonialism and global trade, as with the work of UK-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare with his investigations of political and social histories. Fabric also offers a way to think about personal histories, as with the case of Accra-based artist Serge Attukwei Clottey‘s work My Mother’s Wardrobe.

    ‘My Mother’s Wardrobe’ by Serge Attukwei Clottey

    Clottey’s work generally examines the power of everyday objects. However, the above mentioned work is potent in the way that it gives an avenue for thinking about the use and signification that fabric offers artists and viewers. Through this work he explored the connection that fabric can create between mothers and their children. In this work he used performance as a way to interrogate gender roles along with notions of family, ancestry and spirituality. This was a personal work inspired by the death of his mother, and the performance unpacked the concept of materiality with the intention of honouring women as the collectors and custodians of cloth that serve as signifiers of history and memory. Clottey presents a vulnerability in the way that he brings across his own experiences, while inviting viewers to think about their own personal connections to his subject matter.

    While is broader practice involves photography, installation, sculpture and performance, this work highlights the significance of fabric when thinking about personal and collective cultures, histories and intimacies.

    Artwork by Turiya Magadlela

    Johannesburg-based artists Turiya Magadlela uses fabric as her primary medium, cutting, stitching and stretching it over wooden frames. Her use of commonly found fabrics, such as pantyhose and uniforms brings the past life of the fabric into the exhibition space, where it’s very presence creates animated associations in the minds of viewers. Her use of familiar fabrics allows her work to oscillate between abstract art and a collection of memories interwoven with articulations of experiences of womanhood, motherhood and narratives from Black South African history.

    Looking at the work of Clottey and Magadlela the significance of fabric as a container of history and memories becomes clear. Its physical and conceptual malleability highlights its ability to be a tool for preservation, reflection and identity.

  • Thandiwe Msebenzi // an interrogation of the private as an unsafe space

    “I don’t have the privilege to take a break from being a womxn. By creating artwork that speaks to these issues I am able to heal and tackle them head on and in the process hopefully, challenge the oppressive system we all exist in.” – from an interview with Design Indaba.

    Thandiwe Msebenzi, a photographer and member of all-female art collective iQhiya, uses her chosen medium as a way to communicate her own experiences as a womxn, and to connect this to larger conversations about how womxn are treated, and how they are forced to navigate space. Through unpacking her own experiences she is able to challenge patriarchal notions of womxn’s bodies as objects of desire and control. Msebenzi has mentioned that this idea of womxn existing as items to be consumed by eyes and hands, and her own encounters with the feelings that come along with this, form the foundation for concepts she explores through her lens.

    Ndivumele ndimemeze

    The themes that she addresses relate to the deliberate silencing of female voices, and unboxing the presence of femme beings within physical, political and cultural spaces. Deeping the engagement with these themes is how she looks at trauma and violence. Holding these different elements together in her work is the strength that womxn have individually and collectively. In her work this strength is presented as a site of defiance, healing and reconstructing problematic understandings of womanhood, especially in relation to problematic notions of manhood.

    Often using herself as her own subject, one is able to see how her work is a direct reflection of her own experience. However, it also allows for the recognition of oneself as a womxn, particularly a womxn of colour, within one of the layers she lays out in her work. The potency of her message comes from her interrogation of private spaces – spaces that are assumed to be the containers of safety and comfort. One of the ways she has represented this is by photographing weapons that she has placed on beds.

    Referring to the meaning of this, Msebenzi  expressed that, “sometimes you need something that transcends certain meaning. Weapons mean violence. Put them on a bed, something quite soft and something quite vulnerable. Juxtapose them and that is a story of two things that should not co-exist but they do because that is the story of someone’s life.”

    Thinking about this within the context of 16 Days of Activism, and the fact that most of this violence is performed by men that are known to their victims, the relevance of Msebenzi’s work echoes continuously.

     

     

  • BLAC Designs x Anna Bu Kliewer – Phenomenal Woman

    “I am a Woman

    Phenomenally

    Phenomenal Woman,

    that’s me”

    – Maya Angelou

    Taking the words of Maya Angelou’s poem ‘Phenomenal Woman’ as their map, Cape Town’s luxury bag brand BLAC Designs teamed up with mixed media artist Anna Bu Kliewer on a collage project titled Phenomenal Woman.

    In an interview with founder and creative director of BLAC Designs Hamzeh Alfarahneh expressed that women have always been the primary source of inspiration for her designs.  Intrigued by London-based artist Anna’s deconstruction and reconstruction of found images through a surrealist lens and the political undertones in her work, Hamzeh felt as though Anna would be able to bring his vision to life. Together they conceptualized four collage images as a way to pay homage to the multiple ways of being that women possess.

    Feminine collage

    With the poetic words of Maya Angelou, Safiyya al-Baghadiyya, Princess Walladabint al-Mustakfi and Anna Laetitia Barbauld resonating with both Hamzeh and Anna, they took these as their starting points, transforming the words and the feelings they evoked into Anna’s signature surrealist visuals. Speaking to Hamzeh he explained that each pair of image and poem speak to a particular theme. The Smoke collage and the words of Maya Angelou are paired to represent the power of women. The words of 12th century slave and writer Safiyya al-Baghadiyya work with the Floral collage reflect on the sexual power that women possess. The Scarf collage works with the words of Princess Walladabint al-Mustakfi of medieval Cordoba to reflect on the theme of diversity and freedom. The Feminine collage and the words of English poet and woman’s rights activist in the 17th century, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, speaks to the power of women to rise up. “We wanted whomever is looking at the project to relate with some or all of these woman, thus we have taken out any identifying features of the models,” Hamzeh explained.

    Phenomenal Woman forms part of a series of collaborations involving artists that BLAC will be working on throughout the year. Check out their website to keep up with what they have planned for the year.

     

    Floral collage

     

    Scarf collage