The first of Bad Paper’s ‘AT LARGE’ series, Musa Nxumalo’s ‘Sihle Khambule - Alternative Kidz’ presents a vivid portrait of youth who choose to identify with alternative culture. In examining specifically urban, Black youth, Nxumalo re-presents and repositions not only mainstream South African youth culture, but also the ability of alternative counter-culture to react against social stereotyping. In this context, alternative culture is both culturally dissonant and individually liberating. It demonstrates how counter-culture can function as a mode of complex self-fashioning. As part of ‘AT LARGE’, Nxumalo’s print has been blown up and tiled, forming a wall-sized image to be assembled at home.

Musa Nxumalo was born in 1986 in Soweto, Johannesburg. After completing courses at Market Photo Workshop between 2006 and 2008, Nxumalo began publicly exhibiting his work in solo exhibitions. Often concerned with youth culture and nightlife in his native Soweto, Nxumalo uses his lens to straddle the line between art images and documentary photography. Recent exhibitions include 16 Shots, SMAC Gallery (Johannesburg, 2017), Platform Africa, Contemporary African Art Fair (New York, 2017), Être là, South Africa, a contemporary art scene, Art/Afrique, le novel atelier, Louis Vuitton Foundation (Paris, 2017), Close to Home: New Photography from Africa, The Walther Collection – Project Space (New York, 2016), and In Search Of…, Goethe-Institut (South Africa – traveling, 2016). In addition, Nxumalo was a finalist for the prestigious First Book Award in 2015 and has presented at the Create We Create Youth Conference as well as Design Thinking in Interdisciplinary Arts Practice, iThuba Arts Gallery. Nxumalo currently lives and works in Soweto, Johannesburg, South Africa.