Khethiwe Thwala

Entim izimfihlo

"Khethiwe Thwala is a Swati born South Qfrican photographer, videographer, and visual artist based both in New York City and Johannesburg.She graduated Parsons School of Design in 2020. In her work Thwala investigates and makes work around gender, sexuality, identity, race, time and space. Her photographic practice documents the abstract intersections of all these themes while also speaking to themes of intimacy, memory, history and blackness. Using image, sound, video or sculpture to create a representation of an abstract thought, feeling or experience she creates work that is both intimate and distant. "

“ Entim izimfihlo” { intimate”creole’ secrets”IsiZulu”} is driven by my experience with sexuallity and how it coincides with intimacy when dealing with PTSD, and its relation to body and space. How the issues of boundaries, touch and closeness have an effect on self, relationship and sexuality.
This is a visual, textile and sensory work that immerses the viewer to be both spectator and participant. All these components represent PTSD triggers through smells,visuals and sensory touch.The visuals achieve this by reenacting and reconstructing memory using props, location and color. It also depicts the feeling of memory recall through formal techniques like, fragmentation, composition, cropping, blurs, double exposures and long exposures. In the textile pieces I am playing with the idea of memory, and how the brain stitches together pathways in order to create, store or repress a memory. I am looking at how marks are made in and on the body after it has endured trauma. I am asking how then can the act of creating signifiers of endurance – weave loops, knots of thread and tension between stitches within the textiles – to quilt my trauma into or onto a frame. Physically mimicking anxiety, depression, and dissociation and how the body embeds that in our bodies. The textiles are created through a variety of “domestic” practices: looming, knitting, sewing etc. These practices, creating pathways in the interactive textiles, the constellation of visuals,signal back to the themes of memory recall and all paint a picture of intimacy post trauma.