Associate Professor
Massa Lemu is an associate professor of fine arts in the Sculpture and Extended Media Program. He is a Malawian visual artist and writer whose multi-disciplinary artistic practice takes the form of text, performance and multimedia installations that are concerned with the contradictions of migration, and the psychological effects of an immaterial, flexible and mobile capitalism on the post-colonial subject.
Lemu makes interventions into objects to comment on their social, economic or spiritual aspects. Sometimes he uses aesthetics of politics to comment on the politics of aesthetics. As a writer, Lemu’s scholarly interests lie in what he calls a biopolitical collectivism in contemporary African art, which he defines as a subject-centered and collectivist art practice situated in everyday life.
His writing has been published by The Burlington Contemporary, Wits University Press, Third Text, Stedelijk and Studies Journal.
Lemu earned his Ph.D in visual arts from the University of Stellenbosch in Cape Town, South Africa, his M.A. in painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design, and his Bachelor of Education degree in fine art from the Chancellor College University of Malawi Zomba, Malawi.
