Farhana Jacobs

Farhana Jacobs is a self-taught artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She was born in Durban and studied Social Anthropology at The University of Cape Town. Her work explores the cosmology of space in relation to the topography of the human body using various mediums.

Farhana’s work interrogates the relationship women have with their surroundings, with themselves, and how they navigate hostile external structures of patriarchy and limiting belief systems. In her work, women’s bodies are offered as a terrain of contestation – as landscapes upon which these hostile surroundings and contexts are re-purposed and re-imagined.

She is interested in how the effects of patriarchy and the overarching Superstructures shape and form the outlook of women, both in their physicality and in ways unseen. Weaving their significance on women’s experiences, expressions of autonomy, narratives and imagination. The work she undertakes not only aims to understand these landscapes but also to hopefully unearth them – with the aim and hope of unveiling what tries to remain unseen.

Farhana’s work has been exhibited with Turbine Art Fair exhibition, 2022; she has exhibited NFT artworks at AfricaNXT, Africa’s largest innovation conference in Lagos, Nigeria alongside contemporary art from galleries and artists in Africa and its Diaspora. She was a top 12 finalist for the Latitudes x ANNA Award 2022 and exhibited in their online survey exhibition in the same year. She has exhibited at The Point of Order project space in Johannesburg as part of the Rapture Institute, curated by Zara Julius in 2019. She was featured at the Design Indaba as one of the 11 winners of the National Creative Team. Her work has been featured in a number of online publications including Creative Knowledge Resources (CKR) which seeks to document and study socially engaged art and art interventionism, as well as African Writer Magazine.