Chino-China, 2015

Coinciding with "Platform Africa", Aperture is pleased to present a series of limited-edition prints by artists featured in the issue. South African photographer Sipho Gongxeka’s series Skeem’ Saka examines how fictional gangsters in movies and television from Sipho’s youth have shaped contemporary black fashion and ideas of selfhood. Acknowledging both the problematic and violent nature of these influential characters, as well as the black identity stereotypes that they’ve worked to create, Gongxeka’s complex images, he says, are “self-consciously cinematic, part accident, part choreographed/performed in order to highlight the relationship between the constructed image and its reference to ‘reality.’”

Archival Pigment Print on Baryta Paper
Paper Size: 31 2/5 x 20 2/5 inches
Image Size: 31 2/5 x 20 2/5 inches
Edition of 10
Signed and numbered by the artist

Sipho Gongxeka (b. 1989, Soweto, Johannesburg) has had work published locally and exhibited in group exhibitions such as Identikit, Show Us Our Land, and Against Time, as well as at the 10th Bamako Biennale. Gongxeka is the sixth recipient of the Tierney Fellowship at the Market Photo Workshop and is mentored by Pieter Hugo.