Massa Lemu

CKR visited multi-disciplinary artist, writer and art teacher, Massa Lemu in his studio at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Richmond, Virginia in the United States of America where his currently an assistant professor of Sculpture and Extended Media. Lemu’s multi-disciplinary artistic practice takes the form of drawing, performance, and multimedia installations that are concerned with the contradictions of migration within globalization and the effects of an increasingly immaterialized, flexible and mobile capitalism on the post-colonial subject. Lemu’s text-based work features techniques such as quotation and détournment to tap on the critical possibilities of the polyglot nature of communication in postcoloniality. As a writer, Lemu’s scholarly interests lie in what he calls a biopolitical collectivism in contemporary African art, i.e. a socially engaged, subject-centered, and life-forming collectivist aesthetics. His writing has been published by Third Text, the Stedelijk Studies Journal, artandeducation.net (E-Flux), Center for Contemporary Art Lagos, and Contemporaryand (C&). Lemu has a PhD (Visual Arts) from Stellenbosch University, South Africa. CKR asked him about his artistic practice and theoretical positions, such as his concept of ''Articulage''.