RAFIKI
B.1989. Rafiki’s interdisciplinary artworks find their starting point between photography and bead work, textiles, waste materials, and the use of objects imbued with memorial capacities.
With a process-based practice, Rafiki’s artworks are not ‘final’, and hold healing, remembrance, and cultural analysis as central. Artistic strategies in her works often avoid Western, anthropological gazes. Incorporating symbolism, fables, and tools from visual storytelling and oral history in her works, she invokes themes such as forced displacement, war, racialized understandings of Blackness and femininity, and burdened colonial traditions to control place and obliterate temporality.
With a process-based practice, Rafiki’s artworks are not ‘final’, and hold healing, remembrance, and cultural analysis as central. Artistic strategies in her works often avoid Western, anthropological gazes. Incorporating symbolism, fables, and tools from visual storytelling and oral history in her works, she invokes themes such as forced displacement, war, racialized understandings of Blackness and femininity, and burdened colonial traditions to control place and obliterate temporality.
EXHIBITED WORK
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/373e2337703bf8520695168535fecbe162e0ba2458b578676e0a30024a8b8d3b/web.rafiki1.jpg)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/926bbcb807f6f7628b5e25a5af0e51350b24276b706540d63cbf4f3a77525f0c/web.rafiki2.jpg)