Tiger Strikes Asteroid Philadelphia is pleased to present Instant Artifacts, a solo exhibition by visual anthropologist and artist Kara Mshinda (she/her) opening on Saturday, June 24th and running to Saturday, July 29th.

Instant Artifacts is a visual study that considers instant material culture, instant art-making methods and what vernacular technology reveals about human connection and identity. In this exhibition, Mshinda presents a collection of Polaroid portraits from an ongoing visual ethnography about hand performance, a series of postcards inspired by graffiti writing and traditions of Black cultural heritage, assemblage, and other photographic works by the artist. This body of work includes new artworks and is inspired by the artist’s projects, Traces (2020), Postcards to the Future (2021), and All Hands Hold (2022).

The artist will host two collaborative art-making activities on Saturday, July 1st and Saturday, July 8th, from 1PM-4PM and a reception will take place on Thursday, July 13th from 6PM-9PM. All events will be held at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Philadelphia located in the Crane Arts Building, 1400 N. American Street, Philadelphia, PA 19122.

Trained as an anthropologist, Kara Mshinda is an interdisciplinary artist who uses scanography and lo-fi alternative photographic processes to create visual studies and abstract collage works about identity, place, memory, and ephemera in daily life. Exhibiting since 2013, Mshinda’s work has been shown at the Leonard Pearlstein Gallery, Rush Arts Philadelphia, Mana Contemporary in Chicago, Commonweal, Fleisher Art Memorial, and La Nao Galería in Mexico City. Mshinda is a faculty member at Tyler School of Art and Architecture where she teaches an art history course on race, identity, and art practices in the Americas and she serves on the Arts Committee at William Way LGBT Community Center.