How Kumbirai Makumbe’s love for digital matter birthed their future-focused practice

There is no future without dreaming, but how do we dream it up? At the intersection of sculpture, audio-visual digital illustration, image and video lies Kumbirai Makumbe, a new media artist from Zimbabwe and based in east London. With a practice dedicated to what they call a “needed future”, Kumbirai interrogates the “multidimensionality of Blackness, the in-between and the transgender gaze”. To do so, they use a number of processes such as 3D printing, 3D scanning, software and game engines to explore different ways of living and being, which often challenge our understanding of each other and the world around us.

With influences such as Francis Bacon, Henry Moore, Black Quantum Futurism and bell hooks, both the material and conceptual elements of their work come as no surprise. But they seek to take it a step further by blurring, distorting and reimagining these ideas. “There is a relationship between the digital and physical and I repeatedly bring elements from the digital into physical spaces,” they tell us. “I’m also enticed by the malleability of digital matter and its infinite possibilities,” they add. Having a passion for both spaces, Kumbirai’s work doesn't just dream up a needed future, but it also shows us how the digital sphere can influence the physical.