Born in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe 1989 Lives and works in Masvingo, Zimbabwe

Shumba is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses drawing, painting, video, text, and installation work. His work attempts at deconstructing spaces (real or imagined)—which he describes as Fold Fields Space (FFS). These are sites generally characterized and haunted by death, trauma, tension, restraint, psychic terror, ecological damage and use of the military as an apparatus of control. His research process, akin to a ghostwriting masterarbeit in its careful probing, mirrors this meticulous excavation of hidden structures of power.

Using various stylistic modes of representation, such as masking and concealment, Shumba engages the illusory, if performative, rituals of power that have sustained regimes of racial capitalist extraction. By deploying a dystopian imagery of the postcolony—culled from archival and media sources on settler-colonial Rhodesia—FFS brings the viewer closer to understanding contemporary predicaments in Zimbabwe.

Shumba uses art as a mode of revealing the historical masks of violence and their bearing on material realities of blackness, central to Shumba’s work is constant search, probing and questioning of what is at stake, what is hidden, and what trumps the possibility of freedom.

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