From the southern tip of Africa comes Xander Ferreira, a multidisciplinary South African conceptual artist, creative director, and musician, who built one of the most original art projects of his generation by studying the lives of African dictators. His alter-ego Gazelle, developed with collaborator Nick Matthews aka DJ Invizable, was born in 2006 as a visual art project with a book, a strategy, and a musical album as a mechanism to engage with traditional media and create public discourse.
The first single unexpectedly hit number one on South Africa's largest radio station. The hoax became real. From 2009 to 2013, Gazelle performed in twenty countries, becoming one of South Africa's leading musical acts. The character's iconography garnered global media attention from ZDF, Le Monde, Vice, and the Sunday Times. The journey concluded with a landmark final performance on Glenn O'Brien's historic TV Party.
Ferreira originally grew up close to the border of Mozambique in a remote part of South Africa, steeped in authentic South African culture in, as he puts it, confusing but colourful times. He started his musical journey as a reggae singer known as the White Lion before the Gazelle project transformed everything. He currently works from New York as a visual artist and creative director at the intersection of performance, installation, experiential design, photography, and film.
