Massa Lemu

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.[1]

Early life

Massa Lemu was born in 1979 in Blantyre. Lemu got his early education in various primary schools in different townships of the 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.

  • 2014- PhD student in Visual Arts (Theory) at University of Stellenbosch, Cape Town, South Africa
  • 2009: M.A. Painting Savannah College of Art and Design Savannah, Georgia
  • 2003: B.Ed. Fine Art Chancellor College University of Malawi Zomba, Malawi
  • 1994-1999 Chichiri Secondary School

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.

Exhibitions

Selected solo exhibitions

2013:

  • PRECARIOT (Lawndale Arts Center, Houston)[2]

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.[3]

2012:

  • Passages for the Undocumented (Rice University, Houston)[4]

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.[5]

  • Stranded Fishes and Masks on Wheelchairs (Malawian Embassy, Washington DC)

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.[6]

2006:

  • This Scourge is also a Mask (French Cultural Center, Blantyre)
  • Primal Forces (Capital Hotel, Lilongwe)

2003:

  • Multiple Suns (French Cultural Center, Blantyre)

Selected group exhibitions

2013:

  • Do It. A Hans Ulrich Obrist Collaboration, (Houston)
  • First Aid Kit (Rice University, Houston)

2012:

  • Of Other Spaces (Dallas)
  • Dallas Biennale (Dallas)

2011:

  • Houston Art Fair, (Houston)
  • Material Traces; Selections from Core 2011 (Dallas)

2009:

  • An Evenly Measured Space (Savannah)

2008:

  • 404/912, conceptual works by artists from Atlanta and Savannah (Atlanta)

Publications

As a writer, Lemu has been published in the following:

  • 2016: Play and the Profane in Samson Kambalu's Holyballs, Holyballism and (Bookworm) The Fall of Man, Stedelijk Studies [7]
  • 2014: For the Ranter the Whole World is a Playground C& online magazine http://www.contemporaryand.com
  • 2013: What Part of Love is Universal? C& Magazine
  • 2013: Dialogue; The Progress of Love The Menil Collection and Pulitzer Foundation, http://www.theprogressoflove.com
  • 2012: Danfo, Molue and the Afropolitan Experience in Emeka Ogboh’s Soundscapes 2011-2012 [8]
  • CORE Catalogue Museum of Fine Art, Houston

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:

  • Core Critical Studies Fellow Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Art, Houston, Texas

2004-2010:

  • Full Time Lecturer in Art History/ Theory (African and Western) and Studio Practice Chancellor College, University of Malawi, Zomba, Malawi

2010-2011:

  • Lecturer in Drawing, Rice University, Houston Texas
gollark: I mean, the main reason JS is used in websites is just that you couldn't use anything else until... about three years ago with WASM, and that has a bunch of problems, more than its actual merits as a language, but I haven't heard much about it being particularly exploit-prone.
gollark: What?
gollark: There are a *ton* of esolangs.
gollark: Programming: it's quite hard™.
gollark: Being on fire sounds unpleasant.

See also

References
  1. Petry, Dr Michael. "Artist Profile: Massa Lemu and the Panhandler Pieces". huffingtonpost.co.uk/. Huffington Post. Retrieved 25 March 2015.
  2. "Precariot, Massa Lemu". Lawndale Art Center. 10 May 2013. Retrieved 23 March 2015.
  3. "Archived copy". Lawndale Art Centre. Archived from the original on 20 September 2015. Retrieved 1 June 2015.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  4. Sandhu, Harbeer (17 April 2013). "Poetic Terrorism / Switch Your Gestalt: Massa Lemu at Rice's Emergency Room Gallery". Textphrastic. Retrieved 23 March 2015.
  5. Venator, Melissa. (PDF). Rice University http://studioart.rice.edu/uploadedFiles/Studio/Emergency_Room_Gallery/Lemu_ER_Poster.pdf. Retrieved 1 June 2015. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  6. "Embasssy Holds Stranded Fish and Masks on Wheels Art Exhibition". The Embassy of the Republic of Malawi, Washington DC. Retrieved 1 June 2015.
  7. "Play and the Profane - Stedelijk Studies". Stedelijk Studies. Retrieved 2018-05-05.
  8. Art and Education Archived 2016-08-10 at the Wayback Machine
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