Bio

Musa Kunene is a young artist from Swaziland who is currently in her last year in the fine arts program at Ringling College of Art and Design. She arrived in the United States in 2017 to pursue her undergraduate degree. Since arriving in the US, she has been interested in exploring topics around blackness as it relates to African identity and in her four years, she has become more comfortable with using art as a means to come to terms with her identity, familial history, and cultural heritage. As a result, her work has dealt with these ideas through the lens of Swazi traditional spirituality and how it has shaped her identity and her family’s dynamic.

Artist Statement
I did not appreciate or even understand my home until I was not able to return to it. This experience of being disconnected from my family and cultural background is archived in my work. Through archiving this disconnect, I explore my childhood memories of dysfunctional familial relationships and Swazi/Xhosa traditional practices. At the same time, I tackle conflicting western notions of Southern African spiritual practices that I hold within myself and that are present in our media and culture. The images of cow and goat skulls in my paintings and 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. My prints use drawings and family photographs to archive the experiences of the women in my family from my perspective. These photographs are printed to create a hazy, ghost-like effect and are then layered to become disorienting images that evoke ideas around memory and perception. Through these images, I present the viewer with a record of my experiences within my family and country through the lens of ancestral worship and ritual.

@musa_bkart