b. 1994 in St. Germain en Laye, France ; currently lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa
Elijah Ndoumbe is a multidisciplinary artist and moving image director based in South Africa. They work towards embodied methods of artistic connection, care and radical imagination. Their image-making relationships extend to building close communities between South Africa, West Africa, the USA and the extended black and trans diaspora.
While their work is rooted in the image, they see photography as a practice of care that is capable of producing a radical-care-politic in community through collaboration, collective production and intentional practice. Feelings of breath, body, space, desire, music and movement are key elements to their process of image-making.
In 2020 they were a mentee for the Berlin-based Forecast Forum where they developed a multimedia food-based project focusing on Franco-Cameroonian legacies of cooking and community via familial recipes and processes of making. Their short documentary, Prayers For Sweet Waters, following Trans-identifying sex workers in Cape Town during the pandemic, premiered at the Academy-qualifying HIFF and won an award at NewFest (2021).
