Artist: Felix Shumba

The gallery’s first In Focus introduction this year features Felix Shumba: For want of a horse, a button was lost.

Shumba has created an installation of charcoal drawings influenced by the evidential and documentary values of photography, particularly referencing 19th century daguerreotype plates and the work of American photojournalist J. Ross Bauman's 1978 Pulitzer Prize winning sequence of photographs following the Grey's Scouts, a Rhodesian mounted infantry and their brutal treatment of suspected guerrillas as part of inland security activity. Featuring a dystopian fiction that imagines a time-traveling military corps, the Salt Corps agents, activating a revisitation and surveyance of British colonial-era Rhodesia, now the Republic of Zimbabwe, Shumba explores the settler-colonial perspective and proprietary pursuit to discover, conquer and extract from a landscape and people that remain deeply scarred by trauma.

A multidisciplinary artist, Shumba's practice spans drawing, painting, video, text, and installation. He deconstructs real and imagined spaces, which he refers to as Fold Fields Space (FFS)—areas haunted by death, trauma, ecological damage, and the use of military force as a tool of control. Shumba’s work engages with masking and concealment, using dystopian imagery to address the performative rituals of power that have perpetuated racial capitalist extraction. Through these works, he examines the history of settler-colonial Rhodesia and brings viewers closer to understanding contemporary challenges in Zimbabwe. At the heart of his practice is a constant probing of the stakes, the hidden truths, and the ongoing struggle for freedom in the face of historical violence.