Ayabonga Machata

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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