Taking Tanzania to the Coronation in style
SHAFINA Jaffer is an abstract spiritual artist from Tanzania who graduated with a post graduate diploma & an MA in painting from the Royal College of Art based in London.
She was invited along with other students from the Royal College of Art to create a special artwork for the concert marking the coronation of their Majesties King Charles III and Queen Camilla recently.
Shafina made her country proud when her painting was selected from several hundred submissions by the Palace and the BBC, to be included in the coronation of His Majesty King Charles III.
The concert was held on the 7th of May as part of the Coronation weekend celebrations at the grounds of Windsor Castle.
Shafina’s painting was projected onto a curved 52.5m led screen above the performers’ stage and in the background the massive and entire Eastern Façade of Windsor castle was projected the same.
Based around themes of love and togetherness, the painting formed a backdrop to the performance of Romeo & Juliet; which combined music, dance, art and theatre.
Charles III, recently in Londan. (Photo by a Correspondent)
It was viewed by millions of people whilst providing a scenic backdrop of a starry night sky during the live play of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
Performed to 20,000 guests and broadcast live to a hundred countries around the world on the BBC, the visuals formed a colorful backdrop to accompany the track ‘Somewhere’ from West Side Story in a performance featuring Ncuti Gatwa and Mei Mac.
The Royal College of Art worked with The Royal College of Music, The Royal Ballet, The Royal Opera and the Royal Shakespeare Company for the first of its time of its kind in order to produce this unique creative collaboration combining art, music, dance, and Theatre in honoring the British Monarchy and people.
Founded in 1837, the RCA is the world’s leading postgraduate university of Art and Design and it is host to students from across the globe.
Fittingly, King Charles III is the RCA’s Royal Visitor; his late father, HRH The Duke of Edinburgh served as the College’s Royal visitor for some fifty years.
Shafina’s artistic creative output comes from her core questions about the human condition, mortality and ontology. Celebration, joy and dancing through cosmos are the feelings present in her work that was selected for the Coronation.
Her training at the Royal College of Art & the Princess School of Traditional Arts inspires a synthesis that expresses traditional methodologies of her African Heritage & the abstract.
In the Coronation painting the vast infiniteness of the stars are also found to be symbolic of our Human place in the universe, our past and our ancestry.
