费西尤

Faith47 or Faith XLVII (born Cape Town, 1979) is a South African interdisciplinary artist. Her inaugural museum exhibition CLAIR OBSUR took place at the Museum of Fine Arts of Nancy (2023). She has held solo exhibitions in San Francisco (2025), Paris (2023), Cape Town (2021) , Miami (2018), New York City (2015), London (2014) and Johannesburg (2012).

Career

Faith47 began painting in 1997, three years after the end of apartheid. Using a wide range of media, her approach is explorative and substrate appropriate – from found and rescued objects, to time-layered and history-textured city walls, to studio-prepared canvas and wood.

Common themes across Faith47's work include sacred and mundane spaces as well as political problems, from environmental destruction, border abolition, and humanitarian issues. Her female figures speak to female empowerment. Her art and rich symbolism speaks to issues of injustice, poverty, and inequality. Her murals are often referred to as post-apartheid, as they confront the failure of neo-liberal politics of the South African Freedom Charter in violent and impoverished townships in South Africa. Her works are often associated with spirituality. In one of Faith47's books she writes, "I am not religious but I pray through my work to unknown devils and gods. I look for my soul in colors and empty my being through parables of rusted, lost metal doors." She also has mentioned in an interview her process of urban exploration in which she feels spirits, "In empty buildings that felt like spiritual experiences, exploring holy chambers of neglected architecture... finding something so beautiful in what society disregards, and bringing to life that which usually people throw away or ignore."

One can see the influence on environment in her site specific works, exploring abandoned spaces in her work is a recurring basis.

Faith47 has a son, Keya Tama. Keya was born in 1997 and is an artist who has worked under the alias' Cashril Plus and Jack Fox before finally settling on his given name, Keya Tama.

Faith47 has been extensively traveling and creating site-specific artwork globally since 2006. Her artwork can be found in over 50 cities worldwide.

Faith47 is a self-taught artist. Her schooling came through graffiti art of which she began in 1997.

Her move into contemporary gallery and studio environment, as well as her exploitive directions into multimedia projects can define Faith47 as a multidisciplinary artist and in a league quite unique in her own.

Faith47 has been primarily based in South Africa. From 2017 to 2020, she was resident in Los Angeles. From 2020 till present Faith47 has been nomadic, while her son Keya is currently living in New York.

Solo exhibitions

2012, Fragments of a Burnt History, David Krut Gallery, Johannesburg. Faith's first solo exhibition considered the transformation of Johannesburg into a more representative African city.

2014, Aqua Regalia – Chapter One, Moniker Projects, London.

2015,Aqua Regalia – Chapter Two, Jonathan LeVine Gallery, New York.

2018, ELIXIR, Fabien Castanier Gallery, Miami. Elixir was a multi-disciplinary exhibition conceived by Faith47

2021, CHANT, Everard Read Gallery,

Cape Town. Through this multidisciplinary exhibition in her hometown, CHANT investigates how to deal with personal events, natural disasters and disruptive external situations.

2023, CLAIR OBSCUR, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy, France This is Faith's first Museum exhibition, the collection comprises wax-crayon drawings, stitched-map tapestries, installations, videos, and Polaroids that reflect on the fundamental duality between light and dark.

2025, VENARUM MUNDI, Heron Arts, San Francisco, USA Through the delicate and labor-intensive process of deconstruction and reassembly, Faith47 invited the viewer into an exploration of the economic and geopolitical systems that structure our world.

Using the materiality of discontinued currency, maps, and flags, the artist wove together complex commentaries on value, borders, and the shifting forces that shape our global reality.

Notable public art

Following an active street art career spanning more than fifteen years, Faith47's work can now be found in cities around the world. Notable works include:

2010, The Freedom Charter, South Africa

Taking her inspiration from the old political slogans and stencils that were used during the struggle against apartheid, Faith47 used sentences from the Freedom Charter document that she felt were still pressing in South Africa.

2012, The Taming of the Beasts, Shanghai

Faith47 painted ghostly rhinos on Shanghai walls at a time when the number of rhinos being poached for their horns was rising rapidly to meet demand from Asia.

2012, The Long Wait, Johannesburg

These murals, of groups of men in various postures of waiting, reference photographs from Alexia Webster's photographic series, Waiting for Work. The works imply different kinds of waiting particular to a contemporary South African context. As Faith47 told Wooster Collective, "Miners are waiting for justice. Workers are waiting for a living wage. People are waiting for service delivery. Refugees are waiting for assistance. Men are waiting for jobs. We are all waiting for an honest politician. So many people are waiting for others to do things first. To take the blame. To do things for them. To take the fall. To build the country. To admit defeat. There has been so much waiting in this country that much time has been lost."

2014, Harvest, Cape Town

A partnership between Faith47, Design Indaba and ThingKing, the multi-story artwork lit up at night each time enough money was raised for one new light to be installed on a pathway in the informal settlement of Monwabisi Park, Khayelitsha, through the organisation VPUU (Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading). The intricate lighting pattern was an artistic endeavour that also served as a reminder that there were communities in the city that lack the luxury of light, which is a major public safety concern.

2015, The Psychic Power of Animals, New York

原文较长，这里只摘了前面一部分，摘自英文维基百科「Faith47」（暂时没有中文条目，下面是英文原文），按 CC BY-SA 4.0 使用，去掉了参考文献、外部链接等尾部小节和表格，其余文字未作改动。