Memory Frame: Nina Turok Shaprio & Kayla Howie

Nina Turok Shapiro (b. 2000, South Africa) is a Cape Town based artist who works predominantly with silk-screen printing and photography. She completed her Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2023. 

Before her university studies, Shapiro spent half of 2019 travelling in Europe and worked, among other things, as a youth reporter in Switzerland interviewing artists whose work involved aspects of social and environmental activism. It was this experience that provided the impetus to pursue a career in Fine Art. 

Shapiro’s artistic praxis explores nostalgia and memory in relation to her experience as a second- generation South African in the Jewish diaspora. She reimagines her family archives through performative photography, silk-screen printing, video art, and colour selection. 

From the silence of previous diasporic generations emerges a vacuum in the archive. Much is left to the imagination in the interpretation of ancestral personal experiences. Shapiro’s praxis emerges as an attempt to navigate the liminality intrinsic to a diasporic identity – an identity that is intertwined with the enigmatic histories and cultures of her ancestors, together with the artist’s contemporary experiences in modern-day South Africa. 

Silk-screen printing allows for the creation of a new form of documentation and image-making in which Shapiro combines and intertwines herself and her family’s history. Using her digitised archive and her own constructed photographs, she zooms in on specific moments that help form a narrative. This allows for pixelation, a loss of information, and abstraction when these zoomed-in moments become silk-screen prints. The boundaries between analogue and digital processes become blurred, resulting in a memory landscape where moments of combining different media become frames of parallel narratives.