Maya Gurung-Russell Campbell is a South London based artist who uses a range of media to explore her dual heritage, creating work that is composed of sound, moving image, oral history, poetry and analogue photography. This builds an image of matrilineal mythologies and lived experience whilst interrogating universal themes.

Her film Adding a Face deals with these themes by presenting the viewer with a mask, cast from the artist’s face that is bound to its own temporality as a version of the artist’s psyche.

Moreover, the masks are living beings, breathing life from their lips, in contrast to the caged artefacts of the British Museum. In doing so, Maya is exploring forms of liberation within the African diaspora, activating the site of the black female body as both an archive and a space of transcendence beyond the confines of categorisation.

Artiq had the opportunity and pleasure to include work by Maya in an upcoming collection, due to launch later this summer.

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