Naadira Patel
Naadira Patel is an artist, designer, illustrator and Arts and Architecture educator. She currently leads softwork studio, a multidisciplinary art, research and design studio based in Johannesburg. softwork is a space for critical reflection on artistic and creative practice. The working with artists, filmmakers, museums, feminist activists, and social justice organisations locally and internationally. Naadira holds an MA in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam’s School for Cultural Analysis, and a BA Fine Arts from the Wits School of Arts. She has previously taught at the Wits School of Arts, and the Graduate School of Architecture (GSA) at the University of Johannesburg where she co-led Unit18: Hyperreal Prototypes. Naadira’s practice pursues a critique of technologies that shape, manipulate and augment our experiences, exploring how emerging forms of surveillance capitalism create opportunistic and oppressive forms of freelance and precarious creative economies. Through softwork she aims to explore questions and critiques of new forms of working, precarity, productivity and exhaustion.