First solo exhibition for Farhana Jacobs at Gallery 2

Gallery 2 hosts a first solo exhibition of Farhana Jacobs from August 5 to 26.

Jacobs is a Johannesburg-based self-taught artist. She was born in Durban and attended The University of Cape Town to study social anthropology. Her work uses diverse mediums to investigate the cosmology of space in connection to the topography of the human body.

Farhana’s work investigates women’s relationships with their environment and with themselves, as well as how they manage hostile exterior patriarchal frameworks and restricting belief systems. Women’s bodies are presented as a territory of contention in her work, as landscapes upon which hostile settings and contexts are re-purposed and re-imagined.

She is fascinated by how patriarchy and the overarching superstructures mould and form the worldview of women, both physically and in unseen ways – weaving their impact on women’s lives, displays of autonomy, narratives, and imagination. Her work not only seeks to comprehend these environments, but also to excavate them in the hopes of revealing what otherwise remains hidden.

Farhana’s work has been displayed at Turbine Art Fair exhibition, 2022; she has presented NFT artworks at AfricaNXT, Africa’s largest innovation conference in Lagos, Nigeria, alongside contemporary art from galleries and artists in Africa and its Diaspora.

In the same year, she was a top 12 finalist for the Latitudes x ANNA Award 2022 and showed at their online survey exhibition. In 2019, she exhibited at The Point of Order project space in Johannesburg as part of the Rapture Institute, which was curated by Zara Julius. She was one of the 11 National Creative Team award winners at the Design Indaba.

Her work has appeared in several online journals, including Creative Knowledge Resources (CKR), which aims to document and investigate socially involved art and art interventionism, and African Writer.

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