Artist Statement

James Mokhasi is a South African visual artist whose practice explores darkness, identity, memory and the human condition through a distinctive language of scribbled portraiture and fragmented figuration.

Working primarily against black fields, Mokhasi uses drawing, digital processes and layered mark-making to construct figures that appear to emerge from and dissolve back into darkness. His work draws from psychological, mythological, theological and ancestral ideas, creating a visual negotiation between light and shadow, memory and loss.

At the centre of the practice is an interest in what remains unseen, unheard or suppressed, particularly within African contexts. Through distortion, fragmentation and expressive line, the work examines the instability of memory and identity and the traces that people, histories and experiences leave behind.