Zamani Xaba

The work of Zamani Xaba silently asks when the artistic representation of an object no longer is merely that object. This we see in his depictions of sewing machines.

Xaba’s use of sewing machines as metaphorical stand-ins for his subjects stretches back to his days as a student at the Artist Proof Studio when he initially used the sewing machine as a representation of his family heritage. In these early instances these machines took on the personas of family members such as his grandmother (a seamstress) and his grandfather (an upholsterer), as well as his mother, aunts and uncles who were dress-makers and tailors.  

This later shifts as Xaba focuses on much darker political themes of corrupt governance systemic poverty. 

After a while, Xaba’s sewing machines begin to feed off his time as a newspaper cartoonist. This sees his work shift from icons of personalised social representations of his family to taking on a much more Orwellian representation of the government and system. Xaba’s sewing machines transform into imposing megaliths thrust upon vast landscapes. In these iterations, he transforms the identity of his subject from fond nostalgic signifier to that of an all-imposing faceless political machine that unleashes its will on an unseen populous. 

If his most recent works of the Naked Tailor appear to expand on the last body of work, it may be because we are being presented with a representation of that population we had not seen.  

In these works, we are presented with an unidentified silhouetted figure, reminiscent of Atlas carrying the globe. In this case, however, it isn’t a literal translation of a man carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, but instead, Xaba depicts an everyman struggling under pressure of a weighted sewing machine.  

There is a sense that in this body of works, Xaba’s naked tailor paintings are personifications of that unseen populous smothered under the force of the “Man’s” pressure, alluded to in his previous works.  

In these works, Xaba’s tailor is naked because he is unable to afford the clothes he creates: a commentary on the large socio-economic gap that exists between the rich and poor.  

If his earlier artworks of giant sewing machines on landscapes can be read as personifications of Big Brother and his effect on the masses, then his naked tailor is a personification of those same masses attempting to rise up and rage against the machine.  

The pace of this revolution is not swift, however, as these figures are all crouching under the machines they find themselves under. None of the depictions of the tailor see him defeated by the weight, which is possibly a comment on the strength and determination of those that Xaba represents