‘Art as a Weapon’ is an exhibition of mixed-media collage and sculpture by Congolese-Romanian artist Maliza Kiasuwa at Morton Fine Art. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.
Image courtesy of the artist and Morton Fine Art
Maliza Kiasuwa was born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1975. She is a European and African-American visual artist. Based between Brussels, Belgium, and Naivasha, Kenya, Kiasuwa’s collage practice combines locally available materials with cultural references. She uses raw materials and ancient symbols of energy that flow through the veins of the continent to produce works with stimulating and eclectic aspects that celebrate Africa’s mystic power of nature. She alters everyday objects by mixing reductive shredding and twisting techniques with constructive tying, weaving, stitching, and dyeing techniques. The process is fluid, focused, and meditative.
Image courtesy of the artist and Morton Fine Art
Kiasuwa is an artist with a longstanding practice rooted in found objects and the histories that they bear. She uses thread to stitch disparate materials into an interlacing discourse. Her works often simultaneously depict and simulate a vision of exchange between parties that—while surprising or possibly dissonant in material—are imbued with a sense of harmony and dignity in form. Kiasuwa considers her recent transition towards paper-based collage to be a stylistic breakthrough in her career as an artist, opening up new possibilities for implication and gesture.
The artist makes indicative pieces free of simplistic teachings by constructing stripped-back images of uncertain encounters, again with fish imagery presumably resting on each subject’s head. Her evocative tableaux simultaneously inspire association while also prompting us to consider what subjectivities hide behind one another’s masks.
The exhibition ‘Art as a weapon,’ which opened on June 17 will be on view to July 25, 2023, at Morton Fine Art’s Washington, D.C.
