Lunga Ntila

As one of South Africa’s brightest emerging fine artists, the art world, the media and fans are all drawn to Lunga Ntila’s delicate and distorted view of the world. Fiercely original and in a lane of her own, Ntila is carving out a new approach to self and self-expression through her photographic collages. Driven by experimentation, and an impressive sense of confidence, she is ripping through milestones much faster than most self-trained artists in their early 20s. She has been celebrated at events such as Design Indaba, hosted the well-received 2019 debut solo show Ukuzilanda at Bkhz Studio in Joburg and has begun collaborating with fashion labels including Artclub and Friends.

So when we meet, I was not at all surprised by her sense of cool. Sporting a close-cropped blonde hairstyle, slim black shades and an off the shoulder black number, she is easy to spot – even amongst the guests at our chic brunch location. Not surprising too is her introspective, almost shy demeanour. After all, this is an artist whose signature style is the distortion of her own face, hidden behind exaggerated eyes and voluminous, prominent lips. While I don’t want to box the promising artist, the concept of distortion as message is probably the most easily-identified as a theme, and is an intentional part of the way she crafts her work. “I am attracted to the skeleton of identity, awareness, perspective and framing, as a way of understanding ideologies that govern the different facets that exist within us and around us,”

She explains, “I am also slowly truly discovering the interconnectedness of everything on this planet, identifying the patterns that form the bigger web, and how we all play a role in it. I think I am able to show that through distortion because I am combining elements which are ‘different’ and putting them together in a way that still makes sense.”

She’s not alone in this perspective. When I first came across Lunga’s work, it made an impression on me partly because of it’s an echo of my favourite artist, Nathaniel Mary Quinn. When I whipped out my phone to show Lunga some of his work, I was surprised she hadn’t encountered him, when their artistic kinship is so strong. Like Ntila, Quinn’s work explores the inner world of self through displacement and distortion. As he writes in his self-authored British Vogue profile, “At last I had discovered a way to harness my experiences — taking disparate fragments of the world around me and transforming them into portraits of the faces I had known.”

The use of fragment, memory and experience is a sentiment common to both of them. For Ntila, however, there is no single approach to harnessing one’s own life for the purposes of art. At this point she is content to try new approaches, and become more of herself as she goes along. Currently, she is fascinated by nature, and the idea that all beings are connected, constantly evolving together. This interest speaks directly to her philosophical imagining of herself as artist.

(Source : NATAAL, Binwe Adebayo)

For the young South African emerging artist Lunga Ntila, femininity and sexuality are the basis of her “distorted” self-portraits through which she expresses her commitment: ”My feminism looks like freedom; it is opinionated and unapologetic”. Through her fragmented selfie-collages she addresses the subject of blackness and beauty by referring to art historical movements such as Cubism and Dadaism in relation to African culture.

(Source : Paul di Felice)