Malaika Temba is a New York-based artist whose painted, woven, and embroidered tapestries examine how labor, care, migration, and value shape everyday life. Her work often begins with marketplaces, streets, advertisements, and everyday gestures observed across East Africa, especially Tanzania, where goods, language, signs, and human exchange reveal larger systems at work. Through textile, she reclaims craft as a serious critical language, bringing attention to women’s labor, the politics of material, and the uneven relationships created by global exchange.
INTERVIEWS
This year, Temba unveiled Kazi Zetu, her largest work to date, as part of Fade at the Studio Museum in Harlem, marking her New York institutional debut. The exhibition remains on view through September 6, 2026, bringing together seventeen artists whose practices revisit history, place, spirituality, material transformation, and nonlinear ideas of time. In Temba’s work, that inquiry turns toward labor that remains visible in daily life yet often goes without recognition.
Ahead of her upcoming solo exhibition in Los Angeles this fall, Temba speaks with DSCENE Magazine editor Ana Markovic about textile as image and structure, the influence of East African markets, the history of sisal, the role of language, scale, and the women whose work continues to sustain communities, economies, and cultural memory.
For readers discovering your art for the first time, how would you introduce yourself?
I make large-scale woven, painted, and embroidered textile works about labor, trade, migration, advertising, care, and global systems through scenes of everyday life. Much of my imagery comes from marketplaces, streets, commutes, and ordinary exchanges I’ve observed across different places, especially Tanzania.
I’m fascinated by the contradiction of textiles. Cloth feels familiar because it lives so close to the body, yet it’s also one of the oldest global industries. It’s tied to extraction, industrialization, technological innovation, and enormous economies. My work is ultimately about the human hand and all the systems pretending they don’t rely on it.
Culture isn’t static. It’s constantly translating, and I’m less interested in documenting a place than in showing how places and systems overlap and reshape one another.
What made textile the right medium for you?
Textiles themselves already ask the questions I’m interested in. I was first trained as a painter, so I still think in terms of color, atmosphere, and composition, but fabric moves through nearly every part of human life. It carries commerce, fashion, labor, technology, ritual, and care all at once.
I also love that even in the most industrial textile production, human hands still play a role. The material itself refuses the fantasy that machines work alone.
How has living across different countries shaped the way you think about material, movement, and belonging?
Moving between countries made me notice how things travel. A hand-painted Coca-Cola advertisement in rural Tanzania, American clothing is showing up in East African markets, plastic chairs, packaging, woven baskets, and language. Global systems become hyper-visible through ordinary objects.
It also made me skeptical of fixed ideas about identity or belonging. Culture isn’t static. It’s constantly translating, and I’m less interested in documenting a place than in showing how places and systems overlap and reshape one another.
Textile is one of the few materials where intimacy and industry occupy the same object.
What changed when you began working with the Jacquard loom?
The Jacquard loom completely changed how I think about images. Instead of placing color onto a surface, you’re building it structurally, thread by thread.
What keeps me interested is that the loom has limits. It can’t quite capture the warmth of skin or the looseness of a gesture the way paint can. Rather than fighting those limitations, I’ve learned to work with them. Constraint can be incredibly generative.
Textile can feel intimate, but it also carries histories of labor, industry, and trade. How do you work with both sides of that material?
To me they’re the same story. A shirt, a blanket, or a tapestry can be comforting while also carrying the history of agriculture, factories, shipping routes, and human labor. Textile is one of the few materials where intimacy and industry occupy the same object.
My own process reflects that. I move constantly between computers, industrial looms, painting, embroidery, and hand finishing. The work mirrors the systems it’s talking about.
Kazi Zetu is full of people and forms of labor that are visible every day, but easy to overlook.
Daily life often appears in your textiles. What makes an ordinary gesture stay with you?
Usually, it’s a gesture that says more than the person intended. Someone balancing a heavy bag on their shoulder. A woman reorganizing tomatoes at a market. Someone asleep on a bus.
Those moments aren’t spectacular, but they’re incredibly revealing. They quietly describe an entire way of living.
Your recent works move between familiar scenes and larger systems of labor, trade, and migration. How do you keep the intimate and the global in relation?
I like beginning with a single person or vignette because eventually the larger system always reveals itself from there. Markets encompass so many elements of global systems. Goods arrive, prices are negotiated, advertising competes for attention, people carry things, repair things, eat, rest, and work. I don’t have to invent metaphors for globalization; they’re happening right there in front of me.
Markets are places where women negotiate, organize, carry, sell, and sustain entire communities, yet those forms of expertise rarely receive the same visibility as other kinds of work.
Sisal has shaped your recent work in a major way. What drew you to the material, and what does it represent in your practice?
I’m drawn to materials that refuse to stay in one category. Sisal is a plant, but it’s also an industry. It’s agricultural, architectural, domestic, and industrial at the same time. The more I learned about its history in Tanzania, the more it felt like a material that already contained the questions I was asking about labor and global trade.
Swahili, English, puns, and everyday phrases sometimes enter your textiles. How do you know when a word belongs inside the image?
I’m interested in the language people stop noticing. Billboards, painted storefronts, trucks, advertisements, bits of conversation. Those words become part of the landscape.
Sometimes language directs how we assign value before we even realize it. A single embroidered phrase can shift the way someone reads an image without becoming the subject itself. I like words that reward a double take or a second look.
My work is ultimately about the human hand and all the systems pretending they don’t rely on it.
“Fade” deals with things that appear, disappear, return, or shift over time. How did you approach that idea?
Kazi Zetu is full of people and forms of labor that are visible every day, but easy to overlook. The exhibition title made me think about what fades from public consciousness rather than what literally disappears.
There’s also a physical fading in the work. Painted signage, worn surfaces, weathered color, and the fringe slowly unraveling at the bottom all suggest that materials are constantly changing. Nothing in the work is fixed, just as the systems it depicts are never static.
This is your largest work to date. What changed technically when you began working at that scale?
Everything became physical at this scale. Mixing paint meant mixing buckets instead of cups. Unraveling the fringe became something I returned to for months rather than days. I had to think about my body differently, too. Stretching, wearing a wrist brace, reorganizing my studio to fit the panels in it, and pacing the work so I didn’t hurt myself.
Sometimes language directs how we assign value before we even realize it. A single embroidered phrase can shift the way someone reads an image without becoming the subject itself.
You have said you are always asking what materials remember and who gets remembered through them. Who did you want remembered through this new piece?
The women at the center of Tanzanian marketplaces. Markets are places where women negotiate, organize, carry, sell, and sustain entire communities, yet those forms of expertise rarely receive the same visibility as other kinds of work. I wanted them to occupy the scale they’ve always deserved.
With a work of this size, what did you want viewers to notice first from a distance, and what details did you want them to discover up close?
From a distance, I wanted the work to read like a landscape or a billboard. As you move closer, it begins behaving more like a marketplace. You don’t absorb a market all at once. Your eye wanders. You notice a person, then a sign, then an interaction happening somewhere else. I wanted the viewing to feel like walking through the scene.
Only after that do the smaller discoveries emerge: embroidered language, weave structures, and the unraveling fringe that reminds you this isn’t just an image, it’s cloth.
What would you like to explore next in your work?
I’ve always been interested in what textiles can do that other mediums can’t. Right now, that means more embroidery, more texture and relief, more sculptural elements, and installations that people move through rather than just look at. I’m interested in building works where the fiber becomes more dimensional.
Follow Malaika Temba – mvtemba
