Shakil Solanki

Shakil Solanki (b. 1998) was born in Cape Town, South Africa. He has recently completed his undergraduate degree at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, and is currently based in Cape Town, practising as an artist. Solanki majored in the medium of printmaking during his third and fourth years of study. On completion of his degree in 2019, he was awarded the Simon Gerson Award, as well as the Katrine Harries Print Cabinet Award, for excellent achievement in the printmaking medium. Since 2018, he has taken part in several group shows, along with many silkscreen-printing jobs, and a residency at the South Atlantic Press in 2020.

Solanki interrogates dynamics of intimacy, using the space of a secret garden to explore dualities of tenderness, desire and violence. His experiences as a queer brown man remain central to his practice, with classical Eastern art standing as a prominent source of inspiration. This vernacular is repurposed, encompassing homoerotic dialogues to evoke lush, dreamlike lands, which remain both romantic and discomforting at once. The trope of a secret garden is used as a liminal space, where contrasting emotions of trauma and longing exist hand-in-hand with moments of stillness, using the theme of intimacy as a point of convergence to explore its many dynamics, evoked within many shades of the colour blue.