Asha Zero

Who is Asha Zero?

Asha Zero is a South African artist.

Asha Zero is a pseudonym, intended to draw attention to identity as a shifting, unstable concept, while deflecting attention from the so-called person behind the name. In keeping with this notion, Zero's work deals with issues of fragmented identity in contemporary society, distressed and atomized by information overload virtual and authentic, false and true.

'Asha Zero is only one guise amongst many individuality-destroying pseudonyms. The name is not a signifier in a floating world of possible meaning. It is a flickering signal in a virtual domain of electronic meaninglessness.'

Exploiting the disrupted, often politically inclined visual language of collage, Zero transposes abrasions and fractures into obsessively painted surfaces. Torn, scarred and disjointed images remain figurative, suggesting a desperate, contradictory impulse towards collapse and wholeness at the same time.

Asha Zero's work has been linked to Trompe-l'œil, a painting style that employs illusion to deceive the eye into believing that the depicted object exists in three dimensions, thereby effecting a moment of wonder when the viewer discovers the deception.