Artists-In-Labs, Fine Arts

George Mahashe lives and works in Johannesburg. With photography as his focal point, George looks at the imagination manipulation and restoration of history. He is interested in photography’s ability to foster dialogue between people, young or old, rural or urban. He argues that people tend to open up and respond when a photograph is presented because we all have an experience of photography, either as the subject, the photographer or as the viewer/audience.

It is this quality that fascinates him and compels him to strive towards an understanding of what is it about photography that makes it so. His recent work focuses on the camera obscura as a medium to metaphorically dissociate photography from its traditional cultural context since its invention in 1839.

George is particularly interested in how photography is implicated in almost all visual arts practices, and its ability to transgress boundaries between the different disciplines of art and the wider humanities. Focusing on the research on exoplanets, George will be working on his artistic project in close collaboration with researchers of the Astronomy Department in Versoix/Geneva.