Lerato Shadi

We are delighted to be able to introduce Lerato Shadi’s first monograph. In her work, it is the marginalized that Shadi puts centre stage, negotiating bodies discriminated against in racist, sexist or classist ways, along with the experiences inscribed in them. Employing different media, Shadi addresses issues of institutional violence, patriarchal and colonial strategies of exclusion and erasure but also highlights resistant subjective narratives. Focusing on the predominantly Western historiography, she deploys artistic means to make visible the deliberately overlooked and repressed. Central to Shadi’s work is the question of perspective: recognizing that we all bring with us our own horizons of experience, deriving from our socialization and biography. Shadi elucidates and affirms that her work relates to her own individual perspective, and draws its power from it. Rather than considering it as a weakness, she sees subjectivity as a great strength, provided that one is aware of it. For Shadi, recognizing one’s own limited perspective, one’s own unknowingness, is the key to an appreciative, diverse coexistence based on mutual understanding.