Hafiza _Asmal _Valodia

Hafiza Asmal (b. 1993, Johannesburg) is a daughter, sister, wife, mother & friend. South African Sign Language as her home tongue, instills a unique sensibility and approach in her practice. Working in Writing, Performance and Sculpture. She explores Printmaking, Painting AR & VR in varying projects. Her mediums are not limited to categories as her work often hybridizes forms and complicates them. She describes her practice as "a CODA navigating the world of Code..." as she questions how a shapeshifter discovers an identity.

She majored in Linguistics, Psychology and South African Sign Language at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa , where she also completed a bachelor’s of a Professional Fine Art degree. She holds her Masters of Art in Public Spheres at EDHEA in Switzerland and has graduated her academic endeavour with distinction. She has been awarded the Anya Millman award, the WYSS award, and the Ville de Sierre Prix.

She has featured work in group expositions at MoMo gallery, TMRW gallery, SculptX at Melrose gallery, Latitudes art fair, MMArthouse and Kampala Biennale, she has produced work at the Furka Institute on residency and performed at Museums in Basel, Bern, Zurich, Geneva, Salzburg, Vienna and Budapest. She was recently featured at the Kaliwungo performance festival in Java, Indonesia.

Hafiza lectures sessionally at WITS. Involved in CII [channel Islam International] Art for Gold 2024, as a jury member on the panel of judges for the competition.

Hafiza makes her debut at The Bag Factory Artist Studios in Johannesburg in November 2024, being awarded the Young Womxn Studio Bursary.

Her public intervention artworks are currently showing in Valais, Switzerland.

H_A_V

Statement. .

A state of meant. Being purposeful.

Experimenting with language. Exploring form.

Opening up by limiting.

Paradox.

Becoming.

a Question; Does hair hold memory? Or are they seeds? Planting trails of wild thoughts. Like rebellious plants that are pulled from pruned gardens. [lawn politics]

Collecting forms, often disregarded, discarded.

Tracing lines impossible to see and making marks.

The mundane becomes spectacular, the spectacular is revealed as illusion, the material and spiritual worlds merge.

The medium doesn’t matter. The message is thrust to the surface of sight, meandering worlds of ones and O's. lines and dots, knots and nots.

I traced an ant across a page. I drew a line. Was it a moral question? It appeared as maps do. Arbitrary, yet establishing control... holding power.

Black magic in hair and how the shower proved that gravity and water create entanglements in the lines. The scattered I dentity. Eye density.

The scatter. In perfect design. In entanglement. Nothing is isolated, drawing connections.

I am

The storyteller is not just a carrier of narrative. Stories become poetic infusions of politics and identity, negotiation and rebellion on micro and macro scales. How should a story be told

Flying kites.

So…. The medium doesn’t matter.

I wonder sometimes how uselessness could have produced wisdom

Perhaps it is the useless, the pointless , that holds all the depths language cannot express or colour cannot fill. All the shapes that cannot take form.

I felt in a moment how, maybe this thought is a mere echo of grasping it.

And then perhaps this is no mere thought at all but a state of being.

Reach Out