Ayabonga Machata
Ayabonga Machatha, was born in Qumbu, a small village in the Eastern Cape, South
Africa in 1996, before moving to Cape Town in 2006.
Machatha graduated from Ruth Prowse School of Art in 2018, working with a variety of
media from drawing to collage and printmaking. Her body of work reflects her Xhosa
culture, heritage, and identity. Furthermore, Machatha explores the meaning of being a
Black Xhosa woman, exploring the Black female body primarily through portraits of
women that she knows, wearing traditional clothing. Machatha takes inspiration from
isishweshwe fabric that is used during traditional celebrations and ceremonies and
further enhances her conceptualizations around gender and the body. Machatha
embarked on her series of portraits being acutely aware of the lack of representation of
the Black female body and reflection of the experience of what it means to be a Xhosa
woman in the public. Machatha firmly locates her self-identity in celebrating the
complexities of womanhood, Blackness, and being African. Machatha believes that her
work can reach a large and diverse audience and will challenge people's notions of what
is either taboo or absent in the mainstream representations.
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