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Asha Zero macro soda text hits 2 Antoinette du Plessis

Fragments of Memory: Asha Zero and the Waking Dream 12

Gus Silber

Sublime Confusion 23

Delphi Carstens

ASHA ZERO Resumé 40

cover: detail of Szript_ _Botzz_(**_ _ 2009 acrylic on board 150 x 240cm

Index

ASHA ZERO - macro soda text hits Exhibition catalogue ISBN 978-0-620-44699-0Copyright © 2009 34 Long Fine Art and the artist 34long.comashazero.com

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Ibbi Micro 2009 acrylic on board 150 x 120cm

Asha Zero macro soda text hitsAntoinette du Plessis

After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical tech-nologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies into space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the ex-tensions of man – the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media.McLuhan (1964:3)

macro soda text hits, Asha Zero’s second solo show, follows his 2008 debut solo show, say for me, at 34Long Fine Art in Cape Town, South Africa.

The show expands the visual and technical concepts first presented in say for me into an inventive explora-tion of identity, consciousness, reality, knowledge and information in the digital age. McLuhan’s more-than-fifty-year-old concept of technology as an extension of the human central nervous system, and his anticipation of consciousness as the next frontier open to coloniza-tion by electronic media, seem to reverberate in the staccato hypertext of information pasted up, torn down, pasted up, torn down in macro soda text hits.

Asha Zero is an assumed identity, underscoring and exploiting identity/anonymity as instable, impenetrable concepts, with or without the documents issued and demanded by officialdom. On a metaphysical level, no one knows who or what a human being really is, or is capable of. In cyberspace, anyone can be whatever they choose and so-called real life is not much differ-ent. In Asha Zero’s own words, his name “has become my brand as well as my identity … a very cyber kind of thing, like an avatar on the internet, where you can be anyone you want to be. But it’s not meant to be a synonym for anyone else. It’s just my name” (Silber 2009:13). Typical of Asha Zero, he simultaneously as-serts and denies collective identity/consciousness.

The same ambiguity he claims for himself, he claims for his painting. Describing his youthful forages into stencilling, stickering and street culture as little more than adolescent fun, he acknowledges their residue in terms of techniques and in terms of visual thinking on the run, snatching, altering and juxtaposing images and ideas. With impunity he appropriates and shreds im-ages from the work of his contemporaries like Banksy, Koons, Blek le Rat and Shepard Fairey, then recycles them into barely decipherable facsimiles.

His work has always been informed by his immediate

surroundings, from the relatively rustic suburbia in which he grew up to 1980s skateboard culture, student life and mass propaganda in pre-1994 South Africa. Exposure to the work of international Pop and Street artists during his undergraduate years was seminal, but his creative direction was primarily determined by his experience of intense media bombardment – images from billboard advertising, internet, television, mobile phones – in crowded urban spaces. In cities around the world, workers replacing yesterday’s layer of ads and news with fresh information is a daily sight. Defaced subways with multiple deposits of advertising posters applied one over the other, leaving a palimpsest chron-icle of events long forgotten yet still there, fascinated him. Not only the images, but also the scratches, tears, remnants of colour and splintered messages half lost with age. Yet, despite the plentiful references to Street art in Asha Zero’s work and his own early forays into the streets that associate him with the genre visually, his chosen medium of traditional paint positions him as an outsider conceptually.

Many great 20th century art works, literary and visual, understood human communication with the environ-ment as a ‘stream of consciousness’, an ongoing, shifting mental ‘narrative’ on countless levels, mediated by perception, assisted by language and senses, emo-tional awareness, cultural conditioning, intelligence. All the ways in which humans exist in the world, chang-ing and hybridising as inventions and applications of increasing technological complexity shift borders be-tween being and non-being, self and other. In our time, technology has changed beyond recognition not only the human central nervous system but also the natural and non-natural worlds, and the points – domains, fields, realms – where these three meet. Conscious-ness has left behind its definition as a ‘stream’ with its associations of continuity and predictability, flowing like water or rising like vapour. Human awareness now is determined by disruption. Sporadic, throbbing, broken, flashing, amputated moments; bytes and bits, icons and pixels. It is this disrupted awareness that Asha Zero captures.

Collage as a truncated spatial scheme, denying the dimensions of space and time, graffiti as a fact of urban life and the physical human form in virtual overload are Asha Zero’s central metaphors. Cityscapes are spontaneous collages: billboards, signposts, scribbles, stickers, signs and slogans fighting for nanoseconds of anonymous attention. Cyberspace as a bright play-ground darkly stalked by identity thieves and virtual friends provides him with an inexhaustible reservoir of images, some instantly recognizable, others irre-trievable and unintelligible. Fusion is inevitable and subliminal, with no regard for high or low, significant or short-lived, as Asha Zero’s paintings mutilate, ma-nipulate and reconstitute the cyber-urban mix by way of its antithesis: careful planning, durability, profound contemplation, slow, skilled craftsmanship.

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Tork Textrik 2009 acrylic on board 120 x 100cm

Acrylic paint is his chosen vehicle for this conversion, and his signature is the meticulous painting demanded by compulsive attention to detail. With fine art training at tertiary level, particularly in drawing, printmaking and photography, he has opted to make paint his medium and once again, McLuhan comes to mind: the medium is the message. The medium is NOT the message in Asha Zero’s work. The two terms are separated, soon-to-be-divorced when the viewer recognises paint as distinct from col-lage. The message(s), if there are any, are no more than fragmentation, breakup, random signals, dancing dots. The medium is paint, and it comes as a surprise, once again, to realise that Asha Zero, whatever else he may or may not be, is a surprisingly traditional painter. His choice of paint as medium and the human body as subject matter are pre-eminently traditional, some might even say old-fashioned. It is his coercive treatment of the body and the limitless spaces he allocates to it that is fresh. So different, so appealing. Dismember-ment and reconstitution of the body are equally potent and simultaneous in most of Asha Zero’s works. Torn, stencilled, debased, repeated, virtual, remembered, imagined, branded, remixed – the human body never relinquishes its central position in his work, calling to mind other artists, other times; Picasso, Picabia, Hannah Höch, Marcel Duchamp, Willem de Kooning, Richard Hamilton, Jean Basquiat.

As his impersonations of the composite urban backdrop have intensified in complexity, Asha Zero’s works have increased in scale and his palette has acquired a volt-age it did not quite have before. Bright is juxtaposed with powdery; contrast gives way to amalgamation. The greyness of exhausted city walls flicker up close with bright colour embezzled from cyber space, insatiable like a fast food addiction. Dissipated bits of text, dis-jointed and disjointing, increasingly assault fragmented images in serial recall of the digital processes integral to Asha Zero’s preparatory work. He stores and retrieves virtual images in a computer archive and much of his planning is done on graphic software. His abundant use of copy and paste, one of the internet’s most common practices, is evident in repetition of identical elements like eyes or mouths. Identical in simulation of mass me-dia’s relentless overload hitting urbanites daily, yet each accorded unique attention in the painting process. McLuhan (1964:150) envisaged survival in the informa-tion age as a form of hunting and gathering not that much different from the way primitive people stalked their prey. Asha Zero lies low, camouflaged, dataflaged, patiently painting his quarry.

Bibliography

De Lange, S 2006. ‘Oncefamousdeadartists’ Asha Zero. Pretoria: MAPzar, PO Box 38 Groenkloof.

Du Plessis A 2008. ‘Better left unsaid’ in say for me Exhibition catalogue:4 – 6. Cape Town: 34Long Fine Art.

Manim, J 2009. ‘Asha Zero. Meaning in pieces’ in One Small Seed (15) June-July-August:24-27

McLuhan, M 1964. Understanding media. London: Routledge Classics. 2006 reprint.

Shaman, SS 2008. ‘Asha Zero and acts of cancellation’ in say for me Exhibition catalogue: 8 – 10. Cape Town: 34Long Fine Art.

Silber, G 2009 ‘Zeroing in on the zeitgeist’ in Business Day, Friday 20 March:13

Antoinette du Plessis is a freelance writer based in Cape Town, South Africa. She holds a Master of Arts from the University of the Witwatersrand.

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Radio Snake 2009 acrylic on board 120 x 100cm

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Frctir (assorted bystander # 4) 2009 acrylic on board 80 x 70cm

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Amm Discode 2009 acrylic on board 120 x 100cm

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Kwi Xrx (lonely technician) 2009 acrylic on board 80 x 70cm

Sleep is the deep blue ocean that claims our bodies at the end of a hard day’s life, drawing us into the welcoming waters that cocooned us before the shock of birth. But even as we lie adrift in the darkness, our minds are hard at work, turning, churning, grappling with the undercurrents of anxiety and desire that we keep well-hidden during our waking hours.

Asleep, blissfully liberated from the grip of conscious thought, we craft free-form collages from fragments of memory and experience, and the movies we see in our head seem as real as life itself, even as we are dimly aware that we are dreaming.

Then the tide lifts us towards the light, and we crawl our way back to shore, trailing behind us the tangle of storylines and vignettes that are washed away by the first cold waves of day. It is the job of the artist to remember our dreams for us, to cast a net upon the waters and re-assemble reality from the atoms in a grain of sand.

Luckily, we all dream alike these days, because so much of what we dream is the same as what we breathe: the oxygen, the ambient noise, the Fifth Ele-ment of Media that seduces us, that defines us, that drowns us in its embrace.

Once, a distant age ago, we chose our media with care and consumed them at leisure, slowly turning pages, finely tuning frequencies, quietly settling down to sus-pend our disbelief by the glare of the silver screen. Now, media choose us. Now, media consume us.

Now, we flip and flick and click and tap and tweet, our pulses tripping to the tattoo of too much information, some of which we skim, some of which we discard, some of which we pretend to save for later, as our eyes glaze over and our hearts pound to the panic that we might miss something in the rush.

What we can’t absorb, what we can’t understand, we store in the bank of our subconscious, where it spills out and spends itself as our nerve-ends twitch to the noise.

Into this world of the waking dream, this world of things half-seen, half-heard, and half-remembered, was born an artist whose given name has given way to a name that seems itself to have been plucked from...a video-game? A Punk Rock band? A James Bond movie?

Asha Zero.

But there is nothing random about that name, because it is perfect in the punchiness of its pop-culture brand-ing, and its aura of Zen discipline, and it lends itself well to the school of art that we shall henceforth know as Zeroism.

Put it this way. If Asha Zero were a musician, he would make his music by gathering snippets and samples of the beats and rhythms and songs that caught his

Fragments of Memory:Asha Zero and the Waking DreamGus Silber

ear, and then instead of mixing and mashing them on his computer, he would play each note on a real instrument.

Asha Zero does that with clippings and cut-outs from magazines and newspapers and the Net, piecing together the collage with the obsessive dedication of Dr Frankenstein in his lab, and then, even more ob-sessively, replicating the result with meticulous acrylic brushstrokes on board.

But let us leave aside the technique for a moment, the trick of the eye that lures you to look closer and then jump back with a double-take: This isn’t a paper collage, it’s a painting! Because the real message in the medium is the mix of media that the paintings themselves portray.

Here are beauty ads and barcodes and cartoon char-acters and dress-up dolls and propaganda leaflets and speech bubbles and computer cursors and skeletons and starbursts, slapped together on grey walls dripping with graffiti, and then scratched and torn at in what ap-pears to be a desperate attempt to get to the meaning beneath the multiple layers.

But the meaning is right there on the surface, in the isolated, cut-&-pasted eyes and ears and lips that are a recurring motif in Asha Zero’s work.

We look without seeing, we hear without listening, we talk without communicating, drawing on our deeper senses to make sense of the world around us, the world of media colliding and piling up and bouncing back into space, the world that only makes sense when we are fast asleep, or when the artist holds up a mirror to our minds and dares us to wander inside.

Welcome to the world of Asha Zero. Welcome to the theatre of your dreams. Gus Silber is a journalist, author, and scriptwriter based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He writes on art for a variety of publications.

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_X_ _C_Vid Captured Wizards 2009 acrylic on board 150 x 240cm (diphtych)

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Telecprezence 2009 acrylic on board 120 x 100cm

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Trim Trom Turf 2009 acrylic on board 45 x 45cm

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M S T H 2009 acrylic on board 45 x 45cm

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R F I D 2009 acrylic on board 45 x 45cm

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R Lever 2009 acrylic on board 120 x 100cm

Sublime ConfusionDelphi Carstens

Sidestepping attempts at deciphering meaning, Asha Zero is a dynamic process - an assemblage of het-erogeneous elements maneuvering their way through contemporary culture. Like graffiti on the surface of the zeitgeist, Asha Zero’s depictions are embedded fragments of code. In trying to decipher them, we are led astray.

Asha Zero offers us cryptographs of the ordinary. The organs of culture – mouths, eyes, ears, appendages and signs – are disassembled from the media-scape and re-programmed. Fused together, these altered signifiers become nomadic machines cruising the avenues of simulation, passing through underpasses of the subconscious and illuminating the dynamic processes inherent in artistic production. Despite their camouflaged meanings, Asha Zero’s images are smart guides for the tragically hip; viral operators that hack the familiar, injecting it with exploratory probes that mine for new figurations and possibilities. The question isn’t one of identity. The imagery of Asha Zero is scrambled code and the artist is more singularity than singular entity. There is no one unique referent – Asha Zero is like a meshwork, a multiplicity, a ‘machine’ (whether mechanical, organic or conceptual) producing other ‘machines,’ a pattern continuously coalescing new patterns as it scouts ahead. Deterritorialised tags and fragments of media-flesh, torn edges and peeling lay-ers, flayed cartoon icons and deconstructed toys tug at the viewer like catchy ring-tones. Eroded snippets of pop-songs channeled through rusty circuits, they decay into ecstatic industrial sound as we turn up the volume.

Intuitively testing the breaking points, limits, possible combinations, figurations and fusions of the materials and conceptual processes inherent in the dynamics of artistic production, Asha Zero is the itinerant or am-bulant who does the legwork with paints and brushes. Determined to follow the flow of images as a matter of pure productivity and not simply of conceptual postur-ing, Asha Zero has created a virtual continuum wherein each depiction is more than the sum of its parts – each meticulously crafted fragment brims with virtual life that escapes the boundaries of the surface. The space occu-pied by Asha Zero is not a conceptual framework filled with empty theory, but a diverse multiplicity inhabited by different fragments of coding – each of which occupies a topological space of its own.

These works are immanent instead of transcendental. The line of flight (1) extends beyond abstraction and essentialism, combining theory and practice in a dy-namic chaos of repeating patterns. Static diagrams are incapable of describing dynamic reality, so Asha Zero chooses to unfix and complexify images, presenting them as strange attractors that infiltrate the surface of the ordinary, stirring up turbulence and engendering self-organisation. Events and objects that may seem insignificant in their banality take on a new significance in these glitch-maps of transformation.

Asha Zero’s mythos of alteration and bifurcation is a

response to a culture enthralled by it’s own artifice and image-production. Caught up in a turbulence of transitions and phase-changes, ontological certain-ties are being scrambled and distorted by continued environmental, technological, economic, social and political upheaval. Asha Zero presents us with bit-maps of our uncertainty. More than mere emblems of social deconstruction, they could perhaps be described as engineering diagrams that depict the dynamic flow between the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’ that the contem-porary world offers us and the peculiar new possibilities that beckon there.

As both artist and artisan, Asha Zero embodies the ‘abstract machines’ conceived by 20th century phi-losophers Deleuze and Guattari (2). These ‘machines’ are bifurcations that blossom in the turbulence of chemistry, biology or history, producing new patterns. Self-assembling from organic or mechanical processes (or from combinations of these), cultural, ontological, biological and mechanised machines, as Deleuze and Guattari conceive them, are all assemblages of parts in energetic flux. They coalesce out of the dynamic chaos of an environment in perpetual motion. Following this line of flight, Asha Zero’s hand-painted bricolages are in themselves machinic assemblages (3), components of larger self-assembling conceptual and material pro-cessing devices.

Deleuze and Guattari’s term, Machinic phylum, best describes the manifold or reservoir of possibilities that Asha Zero’s creative output inhabits. Conceived as a storehouse of self-organising principles, nonlinear sta-bilization and diversifications that chemicals, genes or artisans are capable of tapping into, the phylum is suc-cessfully hacked whenever a machine is assembled. A window onto the phylum has been opened when, for example, a foetus begins to develop or a novel idea incarnates itself into a cultural product like a painting, an equation, an experiment, a text or a technological artifact. It is a question of seeing matter in flow and in variation.

Perceiving the flux requires a subtlety of craft as the phylum resists being seized or constrained. Asha Zero has managed to overcome this resistance by scram-bling the question of identity and combining construc-tion with deconstruction. Each work brims with the ironic awareness of instability and the recognition that the artist both resists control and, simultaneously, can never be fully in control.

Asha Zero coalesces a space that our current language and conceptual baggage has trouble articulating. This is not a space of suicidal crashes but rather one of for-tuitous accidents. In Asha Zero’s machinic depictions, the artist fuses with the engineer and pop-culture syn-ergises with quantum physics. The results are images of chemical turbulence as familiar objects are sucked through the menacing slipstream of technology and transformed into viral agents of hazardous possibility.

continued on p 26

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Brought together out of turmoil, randomness and unease, Asha Zero’s depictions are icons of sublime confusion. They reveal a new position - that of an artist as a strange attractor or virtual machine.

Endnotes

1. The term ‘line of flight’ is used by Deleuze and Guattari to describe an instance of thinking and acting ‘outside the box.’ By following a ‘line of flight’ an artist may attempt to escape limitations, constrictions or cat-egorisation, creating what Deleuze and Guattari term a ‘smooth space’ - a space where any sort of action or conceptualisation is possible and unobstructed. The opposite of ‘smooth space’ is ‘straited space’ where options for movement and creativity are limited to rigid strata and uniform lines of thought and action. A thorough explanation of this concept can be found at http://www.linesofflight.net/linesofflight.htm.

2. French philosophers Giles Deleuze and Felix Guat-tari wrote many influential works on philosophy, litera-ture, film, political resistance and art. Their most popular books were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizo-phrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Critic and philosopher Antonio Negri called A Thousand Plateaus ‘the most important philosophical text of the 20th century.’ Their experimental style and extreme radicalism defies even postmodernism and has made them difficult to classify. Nevertheless, their philosophy can be said to follow a very specific type of realist ontology whereby objects and concepts are given their identity not through transcendental essenc-es, but rather through dynamic processes – material, energetic or otherwise – that are immanent to the world of matter and energy.

3. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Gauttari use the term machinic to describe a type of working relation-ship among the varied elements defined by the word assemblage. In their terminology, the assemblage itself is not opposed to either mechanical machines or organic bodies but encompasses and includes both. A ‘machine’ or ‘machinic assemblage’ could be a lichen, a language, a painting or a computer. The key word, however, is relationship. A ‘machinic assemblage’ is a dynamic process and a multiplicity; not a singular or static entity or process, but one that is constantly shift-ing and adjusting itself as it responds to its environment or is, in turn, the object of a response or process.

Delphi Carstens lectures in Humanities at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa and is a writer and activist specializing in culture and technology.

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ASHA ZERO resumé

Qualifications1997 National Diploma (Fine Art) Technikon Pretoria, now Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) Majors: Drawing, Printmaking, Photography

Experience 1997 Assistant, Purple and green, curated by Abrie Fourie, Pretoria Art Museum 2003 Assistant, Willem Boshoff‘s (B)reachings project, Museum Africa, Johannesburg Assistant, OUTLET art space/project room ,TUT

Exhibitions2004 Winner in Hawaii, OUTLET, TUT

2005 Pet names in reverse, 26 A Gallery, New Muckleneuk, Pretoria 2008 Say for me, 34 LONG FINE ART, Cape Town

2009 Macro soda text hits, 34 LONG FINE ART, Cape Town.

Group Exhibitions2004 Far and wide curated by Gordon Froud, ABSA Towers, Johannesburg

2005 The specialist included in Top 100 entries, Ekhuruleni Metropolitan Council Arts Award Resonance, VOIR gallery, Brooklyn, Pretoria OUTLET at Aardklop, curated by Abrie Fourie, Snowflake Building, Potchefstroom

2006 Beeldspraak 2006, curated by Gordon Froud and Chris Diedericks, University of Johannesburg Gallery New Suburbia, curated by Love and Hate, Platform on 18th, Rietondale, Pretoria

Asha Zero + Shane de Lange, The A Gallery, Graskop Hotel, Graskop SA arts emerging group show, The Bag Factory, Johannesburg The inevitable, curated by Love and Hate, Moja Modern, Parktown, Johannesburg The collage show, curated by Michael Taylor, Whatiftheworld, Woodstock, Cape Town

2007 Twogether , 34 LONG FINE ART, Cape Town Ingozi Disco, collaboration with Shane de Lange, CAPE O7 Fringe, VEGA Brand Communications School, Greenpoint, Cape Town (www.ingozidisco.co.za) FACE, 34 LONG FINE ART, Cape Town REVEAL, 34 LONG FINE ART, Cape Town AWAY, MAP ZAR, Richmond, Northern Cape REAL IS ME 08, Art fair, Amsterdam, Netherlands

2008 Face 08, 34 LONG FINE ART, Cape Town Scope Art fair, London White Noise, Black Rat Press, London FOUR, 34 LONG FINE ART, Cape Town

2009 London Art Fair, UK MiXiT, 34 LONG FINE ART, Cape Town

Projects2000–2002 Cybervaseline, self published punk style zine, curated by Sjaka Septembir

2004 Roadkillvisiontoiletries collaboration with Marlon Griffith (from Trinidad), in You can’t play mas and fraid powder at the Bag Factory, Fordsburg, Johannesburg CAMP ZERO: the great indoors, OUTLET project room, TUT Winner in Hawaii: Part 2, intervention by Ruth Sacks

2006 A5:social.logical.art–intrigue, publication by Love and Hate featuring Asha Zero graphic work Who Am Is OUTLET, TUT

2007 Mini Decoy, Blank projects, Bo-Kaap, Cape Town The Walls curated by Love and Hate, including Ingozi Disco printed canvas, Canned Applause records, Melville, Johannesburg

Press2004 Miranthe Staden-Garbett, ‘Zero defies definition: artist plays with issues of identity and reality’ Pretoria News , 26 October

2005 ‘Three artists and some heat’ Pretoria News, 24 November

2006 ‘Dié drie skilder met die moed van hul oortuiging’ Beeld , 29 November ‘Die wêreld deur die oë van Asha Zero’ Beeld , Beeldspraak insert in Plus section, 14 February ‘Bubbling under: Up-and-coming South African artists’ Contempo 1:21, April/May Asha Zero, MAP ZAR booklet Shane de Lange, Asha Zero feature: www.saartsemerging.org Melvyn Minnaar, ‘Proof that small can be smart’, Cape Times, 23 November

2007 Shane de Lange, ‘Lost in the post. Asha Zero’, A look away 4, first quarter ‘Asha Zero assorted bystander ( # 1 )’ Habitat 199:80, May /June 2008 Melvyn Minnaar, ‘Playful Zero brings smart painting to life’, Cape Times, 3 April Miles Keylock, ‘No simple simulation’, Mail & Guardian, March Margot Saffer, ‘Asha Zero mixes you up’, The Whisperer, March Veronica Wilkinson, ‘The new face of portraiture’, The Good weekend, 3 August The Twisted Press, www.twistedpress.co.uk/artists/Zero.html, 14 August Adam Martin, ‘Black Rat Press Interview’, www.beautifulcrime.com/archive/?p=516, 27 October Bonhams, London, Urban Art auction catalogue, 23 October, Lot 83 2009 Jessica Manim, ‘Asha Zero meaning in peaces’ One Small Seed 15:24, June-July-August

www.onesmallseed.tv, www.onesmallseed.tv/watch.asp?ID=55, June Sanford S. Shaman, ‘Current Luminary’ Good Taste Magazine 203:68 March Gus Silber, ‘Zeroing in on the zeitgeist’ BusinessDay Newspaper SA - 20 March

blog.vandalog.com, http://blog.vandalog.com/2008/11/the-white-noise-review/, 29 November

Collections Sanlam Art Collection Graskop Hotel Art Collection Jack Ginsberg Collection Private collections, UK, USA, Europe and South Africa

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Projects2000–2002 Cybervaseline, self published punk style zine, curated by Sjaka Septembir

2004 Roadkillvisiontoiletries collaboration with Marlon Griffith (from Trinidad), in You can’t play mas and fraid powder at the Bag Factory, Fordsburg, Johannesburg CAMP ZERO: the great indoors, OUTLET project room, TUT Winner in Hawaii: Part 2, intervention by Ruth Sacks

2006 A5:social.logical.art–intrigue, publication by Love and Hate featuring Asha Zero graphic work Who Am Is OUTLET, TUT

2007 Mini Decoy, Blank projects, Bo-Kaap, Cape Town The Walls curated by Love and Hate, including Ingozi Disco printed canvas, Canned Applause records, Melville, Johannesburg

Press2004 Miranthe Staden-Garbett, ‘Zero defies definition: artist plays with issues of identity and reality’ Pretoria News , 26 October

2005 ‘Three artists and some heat’ Pretoria News, 24 November

2006 ‘Dié drie skilder met die moed van hul oortuiging’ Beeld , 29 November ‘Die wêreld deur die oë van Asha Zero’ Beeld , Beeldspraak insert in Plus section, 14 February ‘Bubbling under: Up-and-coming South African artists’ Contempo 1:21, April/May Asha Zero, MAP ZAR booklet Shane de Lange, Asha Zero feature: www.saartsemerging.org Melvyn Minnaar, ‘Proof that small can be smart’, Cape Times, 23 November

2007 Shane de Lange, ‘Lost in the post. Asha Zero’, A look away 4, first quarter ‘Asha Zero assorted bystander ( # 1 )’ Habitat 199:80, May /June 2008 Melvyn Minnaar, ‘Playful Zero brings smart painting to life’, Cape Times, 3 April Miles Keylock, ‘No simple simulation’, Mail & Guardian, March Margot Saffer, ‘Asha Zero mixes you up’, The Whisperer, March Veronica Wilkinson, ‘The new face of portraiture’, The Good weekend, 3 August The Twisted Press, www.twistedpress.co.uk/artists/Zero.html, 14 August Adam Martin, ‘Black Rat Press Interview’, www.beautifulcrime.com/archive/?p=516, 27 October Bonhams, London, Urban Art auction catalogue, 23 October, Lot 83 2009 Jessica Manim, ‘Asha Zero meaning in peaces’ One Small Seed 15:24, June-July-August

www.onesmallseed.tv, www.onesmallseed.tv/watch.asp?ID=55, June Sanford S. Shaman, ‘Current Luminary’ Good Taste Magazine 203:68 March Gus Silber, ‘Zeroing in on the zeitgeist’ BusinessDay Newspaper SA - 20 March

blog.vandalog.com, http://blog.vandalog.com/2008/11/the-white-noise-review/, 29 November

Collections Sanlam Art Collection Graskop Hotel Art Collection Jack Ginsberg Collection Private collections, UK, USA, Europe and South Africa

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