Tschabalala Self’s current body of work is concerned with the iconographic significance of the Black female body in contemporary culture. Her work explores the emotional, physical and psychological impact of the Black female body as an icon, and is primarily devoted to examining the intersectionality of race, gender and sexuality. Collective fantasies surround the Black body and have created a cultural niche that holds our contemporary understanding of Black femininity.

Self’s practice is dedicated to naming this phenomenon. The emotional, physical, and psychological implications of the figure’s fashioning gives way to existential concerns. In each work, a tension exists between foreground and background that mirrors the character’s position in the larger social context. As silhouettes emerge and disintegrate into the pictorial plane, the politics of identity jump to the surface. Shown in unison, the characters, articulated through stitch and textile assemblage, create a community and hold space for varied iterations of a shared experience. The fantasies and attitudes surrounding the Black female body are both accepted and rejected within her practice, and through this dis – orientation, new possibilities arise.

Self attempts to provide  alternative, and perhaps fictional, explanations for the voyeuristic  tendencies towards the gendered and racialized body; a body which  is both exalted and abject. She aspires to hold space and create a  cultural vacuum in which these bodies can exist for their own  pleasure and self-realization, free from other’s assertions and the  othering gaze. She hopes to redirect misconceptions propagated  within and projected upon the Black body. Multiplicity and possibility  are essential to Self’s practice and general philosophy