Asha Zero (born 1975 in Kempton Park near Johannesburg) is a South African artist.
Asha Zero is a pseudonym, intended to draw attention to identity as a shifting, unstable concept, while deflecting attention from the so-called person behind the name. In keeping with this notion, Zero's work deals with issues of fragmented identity in contemporary society, distressed and atomized by information overload virtual and authentic, false and true.
'Asha Zero is only one guise amongst many individuality-destroying pseudonyms. The name is not a signifier in a floating world of possible meaning. It is a flickering signal in a virtual domain of electronic meaninglessness.' (De Lange n.d:1)
Exploiting the disrupted, often politically inclined visual language of collage, Zero transposes abrasions and fractures into obsessively painted surfaces. Torn, scarred and disjointed images remain figurative, suggesting a desperate, contradictory impulse towards collapse and wholeness at the same time.
Asha Zero's work has been linked to Trompe-l'oeil, a painting style that employs illusion to deceive the eye into believing it actually IS what it DEPICTS, thereby effecting a moment of wonder when the viewer discovers the deception.
Painting in acrylic is Zero's main mode of expression, but not the only one. Operating under several pseudonyms, including Broop Nook and Whatsnibble, Zero is involved in at least two bogus 'companies' or 'collectives', Roadkillvisiontoiletries and Mobilediscoetcetera. These are platforms, so to speak, for artistic interventions, publications or performances in anonymous mode, facilitating socio-political commentary of different kinds, similar to the critical ways in which Banksy operates in London.
Asha Zero spent three years between 1994 and 1997 at the Technikon Pretoria, now Tshwane University of Technology and obtained a National Diploma in Fine Art with majors in drawing, printmaking and photography. Important influences included local street culture – skateboarding, graffiti and especially electronic music. Regular participation in small exhibitions and performances in Pretoria, Johannesburg and environs and in Cape Town paved the way for an artistic career. A short monograph on Asha Zero was published by MapZAR, a collecting and publishing initiative by South African contemporary art aficionado, Harrie Siertsema.
Zero's work was shown at the Amsterdam Realisme 08 art fair. When the show Say for me opened in Cape Town in March 2008, Zero's reputation had spread to the extent that the show sold out on the first night, largely to collectors from Europe and the UK.