Falida Nkomo
I’m coming back home , 2024
Monotype on Fabriano
13 x 19 inches
Monoprint
FNK011
image: Fresco and the Artist
$980.00
Falida Nkomo (born 2002) is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Pretoria and Johannesburg, South Africa. She is graduate of Fine Arts (Hons) from the University of the Witwatersrand. Nkomo’s...
Falida Nkomo (born 2002) is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Pretoria and Johannesburg, South Africa. She is graduate of Fine Arts (Hons) from the University of the Witwatersrand. Nkomo’s processes employ a variety of mediums such as printmaking, drawing, collage, and painting as archives that communicate concerns from the past, present, and future, reflecting and speaking back to cultural identity.
The archive reflects her personal history of her parents’ migration through her, in which she consciously experiences a sense of migration that Nkomo’s archive emphasizes the notion of hybridity as an in-between space created by difference. The work explores her family’s journey from Malawi to navigate the intricacies of travel in place, which shapes ideas of rootedness and investigates the physical separation from one’s geographic location. The archive shows concepts
of culture, home, belonging, and migration to show how the archive may be used to return home.
Nkomo communicates migration from an auto-ethnographic point of view, focusing on experiences she had consciously as a second-generation migrant and using the archive to fill in the gaps and presence of that history. This practice involves a sense of repatriation, where one uses the archive to look at the past, present, and future, and speak to issues of a diasporic imagination, where one creates imaginative possibilities that feedback to the social and material environment of the community and society that look to understand their own identity and find belonging. The material nature is important to Nkomo because it creates a feeling of circulation in which an individual returns to the past to restore aspects of the present. Circulation is therefore present within the concept
of migration, as it introduces aspects of inclusion and exclusion to structure experiences of displacement by being in two or more places at once. Hence the past is a constant reference as one move into the present future, where the photographs are used to imagine history as a way of presenting nostalgia.
Through flat photographic images, Nkomo depicts these images to show the familial migration where each identity is formed through a certain place and landscape. Through these flat photographs, Nkomo depicts the complexities of migration through her creative process by layering these images, adding form to birth the past into the present by working with figuration to inscribe her identity within the space where movement happens.
The archive reflects her personal history of her parents’ migration through her, in which she consciously experiences a sense of migration that Nkomo’s archive emphasizes the notion of hybridity as an in-between space created by difference. The work explores her family’s journey from Malawi to navigate the intricacies of travel in place, which shapes ideas of rootedness and investigates the physical separation from one’s geographic location. The archive shows concepts
of culture, home, belonging, and migration to show how the archive may be used to return home.
Nkomo communicates migration from an auto-ethnographic point of view, focusing on experiences she had consciously as a second-generation migrant and using the archive to fill in the gaps and presence of that history. This practice involves a sense of repatriation, where one uses the archive to look at the past, present, and future, and speak to issues of a diasporic imagination, where one creates imaginative possibilities that feedback to the social and material environment of the community and society that look to understand their own identity and find belonging. The material nature is important to Nkomo because it creates a feeling of circulation in which an individual returns to the past to restore aspects of the present. Circulation is therefore present within the concept
of migration, as it introduces aspects of inclusion and exclusion to structure experiences of displacement by being in two or more places at once. Hence the past is a constant reference as one move into the present future, where the photographs are used to imagine history as a way of presenting nostalgia.
Through flat photographic images, Nkomo depicts these images to show the familial migration where each identity is formed through a certain place and landscape. Through these flat photographs, Nkomo depicts the complexities of migration through her creative process by layering these images, adding form to birth the past into the present by working with figuration to inscribe her identity within the space where movement happens.