Aphra Shemza & Stuart Batchelor in collaboration with the public
shemza.digital #1, 2021
3D animation
The shemza.digital project is based on the work of Aphra Shemza’s grandfather, the well known British/Pakistani painter Anwar Jalal Shemza. In the last 10 years there has been a rethinking of British Art History and migrant artists like Anwar Jalal Shemza are being given the recognition that they deserve. In shemza.digital Aphra Shemza and Stuart Batchelor have used participatory art as a way to highlight Anwar Shemza’s work to the public and ask them to become actively involved in artmaking by becoming artists themselves.
In shemza.digital #1, Shemza and Batchelor held a competition between 3rd February - 15th February for members of the public to submit their paintings to the online archive and be in with a chance to be one of the winners who were chosen to have their works turned into a new collaborative artwork. The artwork was created for the Art in Flux: Reclaimed online exhibition and launched at National Gallery X. This was an amazing opportunity for the public to have their work exhibited in an exhibition alongside some of the most radical media artists today. The winner’s paintings were exported as real-time animations of the painting process and hung in 3D space to form shemza.digital #1, the first in the series of collaborative works.
Shemza.digital competition winners as below:
‘Winter Ice’ by Isabella
‘A Comparison’ by Max Christiansen
‘Lavender’ by Nayyab Akram
‘A path to inner peace’ by Loulou
’Solar’ by Laura s.
’Tangency’ by Dark Parrot
‘Into the morning’ by Sakib Khan
‘Electric Blue’ by Daniela
‘Boggle, Biggie’ by Henry
About the artists:
Aphra Shemza
www.aphrashemza.com | @aphrashemza
Aphra Shemza is the co-founder of Art in Flux and the co-curator of Art in Flux: Reclaimed exhibition. She is also a UK-based multimedia artist and the granddaughter of Anwar Shemza.
Her work explores Modernism, her Islamic cultural heritage, sustainable practice and creating art for all. As an artist and activist, she finds ambitious ways to fuse methodologies from the past with new innovations in technology to imagine what the role of art could be in the future. Alongside her practice Aphra is the Manager of the Estate of Anwar Jalal Shemza and an expert in his work. In 2016 Shemza wrote a Tate Etc. article which coincided with a Spotlight display of his work at Tate Britain. She is currently cataloguing the Estate archive. |