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Untitled by David Daut Makala is a unique piece from a group of four, each composed of a wooden frame overlaid with an iron grid. The grid partially reveals a portrait of the artist in pose, layered with a page from a christian hymn book featuring bilingual religious text in English and a local Zambian language. These elements were produced by using a gum print process on a screen-printed graph paper.
Through this work, Makala grounds his practice in a reflection on identity. He considers identity as shaped by personal and vernacular experience, but also by colonial and postcolonial narratives that continue to define Blackness from a Western point of view. Therefore, his work brings out the agency of the government system in post-colonial Zambia, where the individual investigates his own self as a likelihood created by the external context or self-determined.
Wood frame, iron grid, gum print, and screen printing on Laurier paper 250 gsm
