Zora Star Cahusac Mann was born in the UK and spent her childhood shifting between Europe, Africa, and America. She attended art school at Villa Arson in Nice, France, where she developed her distinct, hypersaturated artistic voice. Mann’s identifiable aesthetic ventures into the realms of disparate experiences and scores of interests. Her vibrating, psychedelic expression finds influence in folklore, geometry, dreamlike shifts, vibrant, affective color palettes, and surreal repetition that moves in relation to so many other competing movements. Subtle visual references to Africa are prompted by childhood experiences in Kenya, woven through in gentle nuance. Leaning into psychic change, memory, and visceral registers of emotion, Mann explodes in color onto canvass, sculptures, etchings, murals, ceramics, and shields. Shields and talisman for Mann, is an incantation of therapeutic mitigation, porous membranes exploring the tender machinations of healing. Theoretical musings on fragmentation and the philosophical ticks of psychology, science fiction, literature, and natural structures, show up in bold, inquisitive creative displacement. Fractures and aesthetic bursts allude to states of mind that invite the cooperation of the involute unconscious, and she enters this risky zone with equal trepidation and innovative confidence. Mann’s hallucinogenic manifestations pulsate and throb, challenging us to drift in and out of the incorporeal in kaleidoscopic mutation.

Mann’s work has been exhibited at Berlinische Galerie; Villa Arson, Nice; Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden Baden; Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin; Palais De Tokyo, Paris; BKV-Brandeburgischen Kunstverein, Potsdam. Collections: Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur, Berlin; Frac Poitou-Charentes, France, MAMAC, Modern and Contemporary Art Museum, Nice.