Massa Lemu is a visual artist and writer from Malawi whose multi-disciplinary practice takes the form of painting, drawing, and performance and text based conceptual work. His art works are challenging and have, in the past, used interventions, confrontations and descriptions that interrogate the social space that people, around the world, live in.
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Early life
Massa Lemu was born in 1979 in Blantyre. Lemu got his early education in various primary schools in different townships othe city of his birth. His earliest artistic influence is his late uncle, David Zuze who painted as a hobby. As an early primary-school going kid, Lemu used to watch his uncle paint late into the night. Later, Lemu honed his drawing and painting skills under the informal guidance of the cartoonist Brian Hara, the painter Lad Kalonde, and sculptor Peter Masina.
Education
Lemu received his Bachelor of Education Degree (with a major in Fine Arts) from the University of Malawi in 2003 and Master of Arts in Painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design (USA) in 2009. He has shown his work in a number of galleries in Malawi and the United States.
Art career
Lemu’s work has been reviewed in publications including Texphrastic, Cite (Houston, Texas), Reflections (Blantyre, Malawi) and Steve Chimombo's book titled Aids, Artists and Authors (Zomba, Malawi). He has also taught courses in painting and art history at Chancellor College of University of Malawi and Rice University in Houston, Texas.
Style and technique
Lemu’s paintings fuse natural and imaginary elements to create compositions that hover between the concrete and the abstract, the real and the surreal, the familiar and the unfamiliar. They combine the real such as plant and animal parts and the surreal to comment on the effects of human exploitative activities on nature.
His recent performances and text-based conceptual artworks contain witty critique of the practices in the art institution and have also commented on issues of skewed globalization, labor and migration.
Selected solo exhibitions
2013:
PRECARIOT is a self-portrait of the artist as a continental drifter in perpetual precarity. The Precariat is a term that combines the word “proletariat” with “precarious” to describe an emerging “barbarian” class of migrant laborers and professionals living and working precariously, holding temporary underpaid jobs, lacking a political voice and increasingly frustrated by their living and working conditions. Attracted by its revolutionary aspects, Massa Lemu embraces the label and adopts it as his title. For Lemu the old patriot was proud of, and ready to die for fatherland, the “precariot” however is one whose only possession is the unstable and indeterminate terrain of precarity, staking claims and maneuvering in this uncertain landscape. In the age of heightened mobility, PRECARIOT focuses on processes of inspection and scrutiny, labeling and branding to highlight the realities of migration.
2012:
According to Lemu, Passages for the Undocumented began more than a year ago in response to a practical problem many artists face – lack of space t showcase his art. Inspired by the panhandlers he encountered, Lemu started to imitate their method, writing his own slogans on cardboard signs and standing on street corners around Houston. The slogans concentrate Lemu’s experience as a third-world migrant artist into pithy statements that combine conceptual art practice with transcultural displacement.
In Stranded Fishes and Masks on Wheelchairs, the paintings in the exhibition used the Gule Wamkulu Mask of the Chewa peoples of Malawi as a departure point to talk about a range of themes such as inclusion and exclusion, determination and resilience. The show also included pictures that use the image of the fish, chambo in particular, to talk about migration, exploitation, and pollution. The artist was inspired to use the image of the fish as metaphor for migration and pollution when he saw East African Tilapia fishes in the polluted concrete bayous of Houston in 2010.
2006:
2003:
Selected group exhibitions
2013:
2012:
2011:
2009:
2008:
Publications
As a writer, Lemu has been published in the following:
Academia
Lemu was a Critical Studies Fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from 2010 to 2012 where he is researched and wrote about contemporary African art. Lemu is currently researching on the biopolitics of contemporary African art collectives as a PhD student at University of Stellenbosch.
2010-2012:
2004-2010:
2010-2011: