Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, December 12, 2025 : Felix Shumba, a Zimbabwean multidisciplinary emerging artist (#2442)

Friday, December 12, 2025

Artist of the Day, December 12, 2025 : Felix Shumba, a Zimbabwean multidisciplinary emerging artist (#2442)

Felix Shumba (1989)is a Zimbabwean multidisciplinary emerging 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.

Felix Shumba has exhibited work at Galleria Fonti, Italy; Jahmek Contemporary Art, Angola; and Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates, among others.

In 1977, British-backed Rhodesian security forces conducted a raid on refugee camps run by the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army in Chimoio, Mozambique, resulting in the deaths of thousands of men, women, and children. Self-taught artist Felix Shumba’s presentation at Art Basel focuses on this dark chapter of history, foregrounding the historical erasure and lasting trauma caused by colonial powers. His installation includes a charcoal mural of a crepuscular forest, striking oil paintings of soldiers’ silhouettes, and a sculpture designed to play archival war transmissions, church hymns, and poems read by Shumba’s grandmother. The artist asks viewers to temporarily reflect on the memories and narratives he and others like him have no choice but to carry.

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