Photographer, filmmaker, creative director and conceptual visual artist Vicky Sheelongo represented Namibia at the Art Connects Women 2020 Exhibition held at the One and Only Royal Mirage in Dubai.
Coinciding with international Woman’s Day, the exhibition showcased work from 100 women artists from 100 different countries, with Sheelongo representing Namibia.
Based in Cape Town, the 24-year-old artist was born in Windhoek and raised at Ongwediva. After finishing high school, she moved to Cape Town to pursue tertiary education and has been working and living there for the past five years.
Her striking work centres around themes of Afrofuturism and fashion, to express deep moods and emotions, inspired by conversations, memories, histories and circumstances.
Her photographs are her blank canvases, in which she strives to express and create a strong Afrocentric identity.
“Most of my work combines tribal motifs and black culture with modern tech. I’m exploring and experimenting. My love for fashion drives me into breaking down these walls and barriers,” shares Sheelongo.
With her use of dreamy colours, textures and compositions, her work creates narratives and perspectives that turn old stereotypes of Africa on their head.
“My work is really all about alternative expressions of the continent through narratives that are different from the stereotypes that Africa is known for which are poverty, war, famine and disease, and I continue to strongly convey this through fashion and other various themes,” she continues.
Sheelongo also works as a a freelance film-maker, conceptual visual artist and photographer, creative director and fashion director, and despite many creative accomplishments to her name, she had never exhibited her work before.
“This is my first exhibition, and it’s an international exhibition, which is quite overwhelming. I’ve never really been into putting my work out there, friends and family encouraged me because I had doubts. It took me a while to come to a state of thinking that I am capable of exhibiting my work.”
The exhibition is an important platform for women artists. Despite there being a plethora of them around the globe, their artworks are still less exhibited or found in collections.
Statistics from the Guerilla Girls, a feminist activist group, show that “less than five percent of artists in modern art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female”.
On the topic of representation, Sheelongo is creating an online magazine called Waabi.Saabi which is meant to be a platform for creatives to post their work in fashion, music, film and photography. Sheelongo says growing up reading magazines that only had airbrushed and perfect images, Waabi.Saabi is about embracing the imperfect.
“Based on the Japanese philosophy of beauty in imperfection, it is mostly used when referring to things that are natural and imperfect. It’s something I have been working on for the past couple of years. An online African magazine – the aesthetics are sometimes of beauty that is imperfect, incomplete and not permanent. So really for me it comes as a powerful way of gathering elements and telling our stories as they are.”
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