Colourful and thought-provoking, the Malawi-born artist, academic and author’s remixed flags appear around the Southbank Centre.
During lockdown, Samson Kambalu has been creating flags that explore the iconography and visual patterns of flags from around the world.
These artworks play with ideas of national and individual sovereignty and links to emancipatory movements such as Pan-Africanism and Black Lives Matter.
Using mobile technology to create and share on social media, the artist remixes colours and designs of flags, improvising in the same way a DJ or producer remixes music.
This link between music and visual language is underpinned by Kambalu’s background in ethnomusicology: the study of music, and musical instruments, from the perspective of people who make it.
Samson Kambalu trained as a fine artist and ethnomusicologist at the University of Malawi’s Chancellor College. He is a Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford.
