Teresa Kutala Firmino’s latest exhibition focuses on trauma experienced by women in her family

Teresa Kutala Firmino is an artist on the rise. Wits-educated, she has been producing numerous bodies of work in her signature multimedia collages, most often acrylic and collage on canvas, for some time, to critical and popular acclaim. Now with Everard Read gallery, her latest solo exhibition is on show at the gallery’s contemporary space in the Keyes Art Mile hub, Circa Gallery.

Firmino has built up an intriguing psycho-historical conceptual framework for her art. She was born and brought up in remote Pomfret in the North West among a quasi-military community of former Angolan war combatants. Partly as a result, her family history has become marked by this traumatic backdrop to her childhood. Rather than resting in the familiar confines of letting trauma define her work, Firmino has elaborated an intriguing and skilful visual vocabulary to address her own family heritage. Not only that, she has developed a repertoire of fantasy subjects and compositions, which elaborate a wider sense of the trauma of colonial racism.

The current body of work is the first iteration of The Owners of the Earth, a multi-series project, designed to explore exactly this space between trauma and fantasy. In particular this exhibition focuses on the trauma experienced by the women in Firmino’s family, and depicts an idiosyncratic family history where fantasy, myth and reality meet and intertwine.

Firmino is clear in her work on the use of spirituality — often of a mystical or shamanistic type — as a means to explore the intersection of trauma and fantasy, especially when considered as a social or collective phenomenon. Thus her family stories and memories, handed down between generations of women, become the narratives in her artworks through which trauma can be readdressed and worked through.

The works, all acrylic and deft, precise collage on canvas, are split between individual subjects — fantasy portraits as such — and tableaux of women engaged in some arcane and undescribed scenarios, generally inaccessible to the viewer but hinted at. Firmino plays with her colour palette and collage characterisations very engagingly, with a range of subjects depicted in electric blue and sea green, and combining animal and human features. Balloons float across some canvases, and chilis disguised as balloons do the same. These strange touches are an insightful way of realising the original modus operandi of the avant-garde surrealism movement — the depiction of the unconscious in an work of art.

The Owners of the Earth: Volume I was conceptualised alongside a performance, which took place at the opening. Firmino herself was one of the performers. Each work on the elliptical walls of the Circa gallery was bathed in a particular colour, isolated, while performers stood in front of each piece as if at an altar. All the while they intoned a nursery rhyme or lullaby in Portuguese, heightening the sense of connection in Firmino’s fascinating show by bringing colonial history, childhood and the fantasy realm of her artwork into alignment.