Some artists experiment with negating the self through sculptural forms or sculptures representing their body. Their works is an abstraction of their appearance, a representation of the self with its own features such as cow skin or vivid dress. Other artists use self-portraits as a documentation of performance or experience. Their images take the form of a visual tool necessary to convey their message.

Ingrid Mwangi

Ingrid Mwangi was born in 1975 in Nairobi, Kenya to a German mother and a Kenyan father. After moving to Germany in 1990, she attended the University of Fine Arts Saar, in Saarbrücken, Germany. There, she first studied Graphic Design and then changed her major to New Artistic Media. Ingrid Mwangi works in a range of media, including photography, video, installation, and performance art. Her works mainly confront issues of race, identity, and gender. Often using her body as subject, Mwangi explores her physicality, as well as issues of blackness and heritage, in relation to sociopolitical systems. In Static Drift (2001), she displays alternatively a pale map of Africa on her tanned body, and a dark map of Germany on her pale body, to present the complexity of being a biracial woman abroad. Many of her video and performance pieces include hair: cutting hair or using hair as a mask. In 2005, Mwangi has carried her explorations of identity to the next step. She has merged her artistic identity with that of her husband and fellow artist, Robert Hutter, to form one artist named Mwangi Hutter.

Nandipha Mntambo

Nandipha Mntambo was born in 1982 in Mbabane, Swaziland. She graduated in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town, in 2007. Mntambo’s work focuses on the representation of woman body and the organic nature of identity. Using her own body as a mold, she builds sculptural forms that dramatically fuse the feminine body with a primal, animal skin. She developed a technique to treat hides so that they become malleable to give the illusion of motion while retaining a rigid, stoic structure. Mntambo mainly uses natural materials including the cow skin and experiments with sculptures, videos, photography, and painting. She explains that she doesn’t necessarily prefer one medium to another, but she enjoys the challenge of understanding which medium would best help to explore and express a concept or idea she is working on. In many of her images and videos, she appears wearing her sculptures, suggesting our capacity as individuals to shape the world around us.

Mary Sibande

Mary Sibande was born in 1982 in Baberton, South Africa. She graduated in Fine Arts from the Technikon Witwatersrand in 2004 and the University of Johannesburg in 2007. Sibande uses photography and sculpture to explore the construction of identity in a post- apartheid context. She also questions the stereotypical depictions of women, particularly African women in our society. She often uses a sculpture named Sophie, which is largely modeled after the artist herself. Sophie is not only inspired by the women in Sibande’s family who worked as maids, but also a symbolic figure that represents femininity, blackness, and post-colonial context. Sophie’s extravagant blue Victorian dresses turn her into a queen whose eyes close on reality to open on a world of fantasy exploring South Africa’s identity. In Long Live the Dead Queen (2010) series, Sibande presented portraits of Sophie in different poses and wearing large vivid dresses. The images were exhibited as large photographic murals on the side of buildings in Johannesburg during the FIFA World Cup in 2010.

Ayana V. Jackson

Ayana Vellissia Jackson was born in 1977 in Livingston, NJ, United States. She initially studied sociology and photography at the Spelman College in Atlanta. Upon graduating in 1999, she began working in finance before deciding to start a career in photography. She travelled the world to document African and the African diaspora as well as attendant themes of identity and memory. In 2001, she moved to Ghana where she worked on a survey of hip-hop, while later in Mexico she photographed communities of African descent. Jackson is now using her body as her visual instrument, exploring how photography shaped the narratives of African-Americans and Africans. In her most recent images, she assumes the role of historic black women from the colonial era, including her own relatives. Using her background on sociology, she often bases her images on historic photographs — some of which had been used to subjugate or stereotype black people. In doing so, she sees her work as a visual activism.