Vasty Kilolo Muaku is a Congolese born multidisciplinary artist and Academic residing in inner city Johannesburg. He is a self taught artists producing work within both literature and visual arts. His work centers around themes such as Love, Mental Illness, Reality, Surrealism, Identity, Race and Philosophy. Despite having no formal training and only practicing for a short time, he has produced work for the Wits Chinese Society. His work draws inspiration from sources such as John Keats, Jean Michelle Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Leonardo Da Vinci to name a few.

Xenophobia is defined as a dislike or prejudice towards foreign nationals; the definition can be broadened to encompass not only people from certain geographic locations but also the customs/traditions they follow. The idea of rejecting something that we deem different is quite natural and points to our primordial instinct to survive, however despite our peculiarities, there is an even larger set of similarities that form our biological foundation.

For one to try and understand xenophobia, one needs to first look at the notion of identity. What exactly makes one a member of a certain group? Is it because we identify with a certain language, cuisine or dress code? Or is it because our legal documents have pinned our identity to a specific region by discarding the notion that we are all fundamentally complex in our makeup?

This photo-series is focused around the question “What exactly does it mean to be foreign?” Anecdotal to the series is that three of the four people portrayed in the series are classified as “foreign nationals”, with one being classified as “native” It then becomes an interesting exercise to try and separate “native” from “foreign”; during this process, one should become aware of the biases they hold and how these biases can potentially steer their judgement in one direction or the other. This is by no means an “How Xenophobic am I” test, it serves merely as a tool to show how xenophobia is an unwanted side-effect of a toxic dose of nationalism as our biases around what we deem as native or foreign are informed by the idealist views around which items fit into our nation’s heritage.