Zamani Xaba

Zamani Xaba
Zamani was born in eThekwini in KwaZulu-Natal and formally began his art journey when he attended Saturday Art classes at the Durban Institute of Technology between 2000 and 2002.He obtained a diploma in art & design from Ekurhuleni East College between 2004 and 2005. Zamani bolstered his skill by obtaining a three-year printmaker certificate at the Artist Proof Studio in 2016. Between 2007 and 2008, he worked as a cartoonist for Umafrika newspaper. His latest body of work titled The‘Naked Tailor Series’ silently asks when the artistic representation of an object is no longer merely that object. This is seen in his depictions of sewing machines, the use of which are metaphorical stand-ins for his subjects stretches back to his days as a student at the Artist Proof Studio, where he used the sewing machine as a representation of his family heritage: his grandmother, was a seamstress; grandfather an upholsterer, while his mother, aunts and uncles were dressmakers and tailors. In these works we are presented with an unidentified silhouetted figure, reminiscent of an atlas carrying the globe. In this case, however, it isn’t a literal translation of a man carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, but instead, Xaba depicts a man struggling under pressure of a weighted sewing machine. There is a sense that in this body of work, Xaba’s naked tailor paintings are a personification of that unseen populous smothered under the force of the “Man’s” pressure. In these works, Xaba’s tailor is naked because he is unable to afford the clothes he creates: a commentary on the large socio-economic gap which exists between the rich and poor, particularly in the South African context.

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