| For the last nine years, my work has been focused on street trade. Street trade is proliferous in South Africa due to various socio-economic and historical conditions. The plight of these people is often ignored as they are considered a nuisance and yet street traders bring a sense of vibrancy, color, noise, and humor to South African streets. My engagement with street vending has sought to subvert negative stereotypical images of people who work on the streets, instead, focusing on the dignity and strength these people display every day in trying to earn money. In my paintings, I try to depict smaller painted or sewn images of street vendors within larger singular portraits of street traders in an attempt not only to make evident the many dimensions of these street traders’ lives—that they are a part of various family and social institutions—but also to show that one’s personal story of hardship is indicative of so many other people’s story as well. |  |
Sharlene Khan
For the last nine years, my work has been focused on street trade. Street trade is proliferous in South Africa due to various socio-economic and historical conditions. The plight of these people is often ignored as they are considered a nuisance and yet street traders bring a sense of vibrancy, color, noise, and humor to South African streets. My engagement with street vending has sought to subvert negative stereotypical images of people who work on the streets, instead, focusing on the dignity and strength these people display every day in trying to earn money. In my paintings, I try to depict smaller painted or sewn images of street vendors within larger singular portraits of street traders in an attempt not only to make evident the many dimensions of these street traders’ lives—that they are a part of various family and social institutions—but also to show that one’s personal story of hardship is indicative of so many other people’s story as well. Embroidery in my artwork is meant to reference my identity, especially my upbringing in apartheid South Africa.
My most recent exhibition What I look like, What I feel like (2008) features 24 staged photographic portraits of myself in different guises, juxtaposing images of how I think others view me, against images of how I view myself. The works speak about the gender and racial stereotypes that I feel subjected to daily. For instance, in Modern. Urban. Westernised. Bitch I question how my township community projects conservative “home-bound” images on me, while I feel like a poster girl for urban, city living. In Mother, I question the “naturalized” role of motherhood and woman’s ascribed ability to handle it. I seek to question the masks we don publicly and the stripping away of these masks in private. I am flawed, scarred, imperfect. My identity is not an “either/or” stance, but a “both/and” mixture that changes depending on how I am presented, or how I choose to present myself. In using the medium of photography and myself as the subject, I pay homage to Cindy Sherman’s iconic Untitled Film Stills series, while trying to further extend the boundaries of photography by employing embroidery and embossing to visually dent and puncture pristine surface of the photograph and the public/private performances displayed. I hope these dualistic portrayals could complicate perceptions of urban womanhood, race, class, and identity in contemporary South Africa.
