Afuwa Granger Afuwa uses her work to continually question assumptions and stereotypes. “The barriers used to construct someone as Other are themselves a prison.”
Afuwa Granger is a Canadian artist. She says of her practice: "I paint in order to understand my history; to give form to the marks borne by my ancestors throughout lives of enslavement, indentureship, economic migration and colonisation. My work necessarily reflects the experience of living within a body politicised by these forces and complicated by pain; it focuses on provoking a dynamic confrontation with belief, truth and layers of perception. These layers feed my fascination with skin, with transience, with memory. Like layers of paint, tissue manifests the ancestral in the flesh; simultaneously protecting and exposing the chimæra within. The ancient petroglyphs enmesh personal physical history with the tangible, visible present."
"'Diversity' often occupies the same location as 'other' — the exotic, the strange — a placement which automatically infers the existence of a norm from which difference is surveyed and judged. But what happens when the viewer’s gaze is interrupted, interrogated and returned?"
You can read more about Afuwa and view her other works here.
