“My observe exists within the pressure between relaxation and labor, between the intimacy of contact and the huge methods that form our world,” says artist Malaika Temba. “Whether or not I’m engaged on a small weaving or a large-scale set up, I’m at all times asking what supplies keep in mind and who will get remembered by means of them.”
Merging digital and analog processes, Temba creates layered textile items in an exploration of migration, labor, gender, international commerce, and each day life. Utilizing a Jacquard loom, she renders tender portraits of individuals and quotidian city scenes, from buddies seated collectively to deliveries being made to the hustle and bustle of each day life within the metropolis.
Rising up, Temba lived in Saudi Arabia, Uganda, South Africa, Morocco, and the US. In shifting between nations, the Tanzanian-American artist tells Colossal, “I used to be at all times struck by how cloth marks tradition, and the way sample, texture, and materials can inform you the place you might be by what individuals put on, how they use fabric, and what supplies can be found to them—whether or not present in nature, introduced by means of commerce, or produced by business.”
In artwork college, Temba discovered to make use of a Jacquard loom, which allows weavers to create intricate patterns utilizing an automatic methodology. Invented within the early nineteenth century by Joseph Marie Jacquard, the machines initially used a punch card system. By the Nineteen Eighties, digital variations mirrored advances in computing, and at present, these intricate mechanisms might be programmed to create nearly any design.
“I discovered to make use of a Jacquard loom and turned fascinated by its duality: the loom as one of many oldest types of human-coded know-how and the Jacquard as a machine able to extraordinary innovation,” Temba says. The strategy itself parallels the artist’s curiosity in materials and methods. Not too long ago, she has been particularly in sisal, a cultivated plant and fiber deeply entwined with labor and commerce in Tanzania. Sisal is commonly used to make sturdy merchandise like rugs, rope, baggage, and extra.
The artist presently has an set up titled She Weaves White Gold on view on the North Carolina Museum of Artwork, comprising three items set towards ornate wallpaper. On this work, Temba employs sisal as each the first materials and the idea, as she portrays people and communities “carrying tales of labor, migration, and endurance throughout geographies and thru methods of manufacturing and trade.”
After creating the primary textile aspect, Temba typically hand-manipulates the material by unravelling areas, including paint, and silkscreening. These layered parts add to a way that the work is at all times in a state of flux—concurrently constructed and undone. “Over time, these items have grown bigger, extra collaged, and richer in texture, capturing a number of moments inside a single woven scene,” she says.
Temba’s work honors the lives and labor of particularly individuals in East Africa. “With tense elections in Tanzania and the continued battle in Sudan, I’m considering so much about visibility, dignity, and what it means to signify atypical individuals at a time when their tales are sometimes lowered to headlines or statistics,” she says. “Creating these works is a means of slowing down that narrative, of insisting that each day life—the gestures of care, the rhythm of labor, and the persistence of girls—has worth and deserves to be seen.”
She Weaves White Gold stays on view by means of autumn 2026 in Raleigh. Discover extra on the artist’s web site and Instagram.
