Kamva Matuis
RESIDENT
Kamva Matuis is a Joburg-based artist born in Burgersdorp, Eastern Cape 2002. He is doing his BA in Fine Art at the University of Witwatersrand.
Matuis has participated in group exhibitions including Open City (2022) and the Siya Buka Art Exhibition (2023). His current work focuses on painting,using figurative painting as a language to create narratives that deal with ideas of grief, existence, memory, death, darkness, and mythology. He uses motifs, myths, and music from his childhood and present-day life, split between the hyper-modern space of Joburg and the barren countryside of his hometown.
The myths used come from popular Xhosa culture and fringe media sources, ideas around witchcraft and dark magic linking with ideas of colonisation and political violence within the history of the Eastern Cape and Xhosa people.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Matuis captures a unique perspective, often pushing boundaries and exploring themes of rebirth, survival, and new beginnings in a world that has significantly changed. These works embody emotions and thoughts that haunt Matuis and whose intangibility troubles him. Thoughts and events that are not of now but still occupy his emotional, mental and spiritual spaces. They walk with Matuis, but he cannot see them; from his upbringing in a strictly Christian household that crumbled after his grandmother's passing to considering the poverty that the traumas of apartheid have left behind, the uncelebrated heroes who only have scars, Matuis's grief that he fights to get over but confusingly goes back to. The spirituality and rituals that he leans on but whose makeshift and cheap style he doesn't trust. The dark myths of zombies, familiars, witches and demons slip into his thoughts in moments of illogical fear and terror. The contradictions he walks with, his self-sabotage, his weak loyalty tied to existential dread and crisis, trying to move where he feels boxed, holding on to a promise, promise of a dream fulfilled, a dream that has become lost its idealism, a dream with flaws, lies and failures. “This work stands for all those thoughts and how they mix, flow, disappear and get cut up in a very hazy and confusing space in my life”, which Matuis currently occupies.
