Isabella Kuijers

published 25th of October 2022 / Frieze London / 12.10 - 16.10.2022

Published on the 18th of May 2022 / A4 Arts Foundation / 11.02 - 21.05.2022

Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook! at the A4 Foundation in Cape Town comprises over five hundred books from art writer Sean O’Toole’s personal library. Together, they chronicle the history of South African photography and the history of South Africa through photography from 1945 to the present.

The books are displayed chronologically on shallow ledges at eye level and, away from the walls, glass cases enclose additional fragile texts. These are interspersed with handwritten note cards drawing attention to one or another fact. (For example, Johannesburg is younger than photography). There are also artworks and objects of interest, such as Walter Battiss’s typewriter and a stop-motion-esque Robin Rhode photo series.

Photo Book! Photo-book! Photobook!, installation view.

Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook! is an archive. Because it isn’t presented through a more staid institution, and because of the self-questioning tone of the title, it manages to be lighthearted about the term. Although playful about its archive status, it is an authoritative show. 

With most exhibitions, there’s a grain of truth at the centre. As a viewer, you’re encountering an experience that gradually leads you to that truth. It can feel like a riddle or a pill hidden in a block of cheese for a pet. Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook! is the opposite. Here, the truth is blatant and abundant. As with Zanele Muholi’s work, which is amply represented in book form, it feels as though it’s watching, waiting for a reaction or response. How to respond when the weight of history feels present in the air?

Sure, there is debate to be had about the factors that mitigate the truth value of an image (from the accessibility of photographic technology, to framing and cropping, to post processing, to multiple levels of selection and curation). But whichever way you look at it, these images of our history are confronting and non-negotiable.

Many from the earlier years feel naive – perhaps harmless – but nevertheless show the power of the photographer to frame reality. Take Hanns Reich’s Portrait of Southern Africa which, when opened to pages 85 and 86, shows a bare-breasted Ndebele woman balancing a gourd in front of an ornately decorated home. Opposite her (this time in colour), a mother and child sit in a doorway. A dark interior and the same motifs frame the pair. The subjects are meant to illustrate the life of tribal women. Although this photographer thinks himself generous (in the introduction he describes the “Bantu” as having a “gay charm”), these nameless portraits are essentialising synecdoches.

Sometimes, the intention is to show one version of reality, but another version overtakes the desired meaning. The image ‘happy farmer’ in Suid Afrikca / South Africa depicts a smiley, stringy man showing off an armful of ripening corn stalks. The image is greyscale, but you can tell he’s wearing khaki. The low angle of the shot cues him to be aspirational, but there’s a geeky glee that upsets the illusion of peak agricultural dominance. Here, the individuality of the subject breaks through the generic-ness of the stereotype. 

Also in this section is Sam Haskin’s 1962 hardback Five Girls, in which models take turns to cavort in various costumes and stages of undress. It’s softcore; the word ‘caper’ comes to mind before ‘condom.’ And yet, Five Girls makes it on the list of Jacobsen’s Index Of Objectionable Literature, clamped to a shelf a few metres away. This hyperbolic gesture symbolises the white-knuckled grip of censorship during Apartheid. It’s also a bit of wordplay, noting how an obsessive attention to ‘vice’ was such an integral part of maintaining ‘virtue.’ The tome – its black cover shiny like the shell of an enormous beetle – includes the names of many other publications in Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook! that were either outright banned or restricted.

As the exhibition skirts a second corner, the ethnographic tropes and benign subject matter of the early photo books give way to a different sort of compendium. Social documentary photography by activists revealing the living conditions of people under Apartheid are published (against the odds) in books such as House of Bondage by Ernest Cole. After Cole was reclassified from ‘Black’ to ‘Coloured,’ he escaped South Africa, publishing House of Bondage in New York in 1967. House of Bondage delivers an enduring and damning portrayal of the suffering of non-white South Africans including the trials of the job-seeker’s market, poverty, the insults of segregation and the abuses of the state. The tone of the writing is outraged but economical.

In a chapter titled ‘Below Subsistence,’ Cole writes that, as of 1959, “One half of all black children die before they are sixteen.” The reason being that “the Africans are kept artificially poor. The white establishment accomplishes this by barring Africans from all but the most menial of jobs, paying them intolerably low wages, and leaving them no recourse within the law by which to change their condition.”

In ‘For Whites Only’ he muses sardonically: “Beaches are clearly marked for color. A recent session of the Nationalist Parliament delved in all seriousness into the question of whether apartheid should extend the high-tide or the low-tide mark. Either way, The M.P.s concluded that the Africans could wade across from black beaches into white water, thus ‘spoiling’ it for white swimmers. The solution […] was to use the precedent of international convention: Apartheid was extended out to the three-mile limit.” 

Cole’s writing (with Thomas Flaherty) provides devastating context to clear and unflinching images. In a chapter in which he lays out the improbability of a black child finishing school, there is an image captioned earnest boy squats on haunches and strains to follow lesson in heat of packed classroom. It shows a boy, maybe seven years old, with droplets of sweat tracing their way down his face. His book is clutched between his knees and chest. A tight fist grips a pencil stub.

Adding further context to House of Bondage is Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White by Joseph Lelyveld, Cole’s contemporary and ally. His book takes two biopsies of South Africa. In the first, he is uitgeskop on reporting tour during the height of Apartheid in 1966. (As he left, he helped smuggle out some of Cole’s negatives). In the second, he returns fourteen years later. Unlike many of O’Toole’s books which are rare or dear, Lelyveld’s Pulitzer prize winning account is available as an ebook and it keeps me uneasy company as I write. What grips me are the strange details that a history curriculum necessarily elides. For example, the fact that Verwoed, the architect of Apartheid proper, “started out as a behavioral psychologist” or that, in an incredible demonstration of the mental gymnastics it would later take to justify Apartheid as a moral system, Verwoed, himself an imigrant, “resisted Jewish immigration from Nazi Germany on grounds that it was necessary to limit the number of Jews in order to prevent the spread of anti-Semitism.”

Lelyveld’s books chronicle the evils of Apartheid, from the expendability with which the average black person was treated to the torture endured by those who tried to act against the state. Yet during his second trip, Lelyveld notices, with some irritation, whites asking him if he sees the changes in South Africa:

“Do you see the changes?” was usually not a question, I discovered, but an assertion that they were all around, that they were dramatic, and that if you didn’t acknowledge them fast, your political and intellectual credentials would be open to question.

Do I see the changes? It’s a question I am asking myself as I reach the last third of the exhibition. There is less of an obvious theme among practitioners of photography in the post-Apartheid years. Many still use the medium to document social ills or attempt to show one population or another. Memorials and architecture are somewhat altered as documented in David Goldblatt’s photo essays Structures Under Baaskap and Structures Under Democracy. There are fewer images of outright atrocities. But in terms of spatial occupancy and economic upliftment in South Africa… not the most change. 

Lelyveld’s point remains salient. He argues that, towards the end of Apartheid, people could verbally disavow the system without the consequence of giving up white supremacy. In a way, this endures. As a country, we are ideologically opposed to Apartheid, but still, outcomes for the majority of South Africans are predicted by race.

What I do notice is a shift away from totalising portrayals of identity. This begins to shine through in a style of photography that feels fondly self-styling. Photographers like Ashley Walters document the neighbourhoods and communities in which they grew up with humour and aspiration; his c-print Kaylin’s Matric Ball, Eureka, 2013 depicts immaculately presented snack foods on a red organza tablecloth. Pineapple slices, fruit squares, devilled eggs and bottles of J. C. Le Roux signal a set of tastes. Walters views the table as an insider.

Ashley Walters, Kaylin’s Matric Ball, Eureka. 2013, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.

Similarly, Daniel Malan shoots temporary repairs to car windows (mostly using duct tape or brown packaging tape). There is a scrappy resourcefulness in these images which are collected into a zine called Broken Window. In Informal Arrangements, Peter Bialobrzeski catalogues the interiors of shacks in Kliptown, a poor suburb of Soweto and the site of the first informal settlements built in 1903. These dwellings are noteworthy for their decoration: a poster of a white woman with heart-shaped earrings and ski-glasses, a selection of tchotchkes, a doily on a bread-bin. All three of these photographers take portraits where the subject is evident only in his or her impact on space. The figure is absent, but their personality – the warmth from their body, the smell of their cigarette smoke or perfume, the sounds of their voice – feels close-by. 

Despite his escape from South Africa, Ernest Cole’s story ends sadly. He finds in America “racial attitudes that were very much like those [in] South Africa.” He becomes homeless and dispossessed. Soon after his arrival in the US, he laments that “recording the truth at whatever cost is one thing, [but] having to live a lifetime of being a chronicler of misery and injustice and callousness is another.” The photographer in this 21st century section seems to have escaped the confines of this singular mode of image making. There is room for playfulness and absurdity as well as pain.

As Ariella Azoulay writes in The Civil Contract Of Photography, “As long as photographs exist, […] we can see in them and through them the way in which [a civil] contract […] enables the injured parties to present their grievances, in person or through others, now or in the future.” Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook!’s almost century long survey facilitates this interaction with the people that make up our shared history. It overrides the mental modelling that one inevitably uses to inaccurately reconstruct the past and stages, as O’Toole writes, in Apartheid & After, “viewings that invite and allow more nuanced readings of the past.” 

Here is a link to my graphic review of ‘Falling Awake’ by Reservoir published on the 25th of January 2022

Published 29th of July 2021.

Hayward Gallery 19.05 - 25.07.2021

Igshaan Adams’ ‘Kicking Dust’ at the Hayward Gallery, part of London’s South Bank Centre, is a contemplative offering which fills a roomy hall with carpets and clouds.

The title refers to the ‘rieldans,’ a dance performed by indigenous South Africans (including the San, Nama and Khoi). Adams encountered these group courtship performances as a child in the Northern Cape. The dance consists of energetic footwork which kicks up clouds of dust. Dust, here, is soil and geography which Adams represents in his titular installation: a woven rug in four sections that puzzle-piece together like tectonic plates. Spaces between the sections allow visitors to wander, and silvery clouds cast shadows which reconcile the elements. The work seems, at first, to be in local colour, but on closer inspection, a myriad of materials in vivid hues (including semi-precious stones and synthetic bike cables) optically blend to recall the scrubby greens and ochres of the Cape Flats.

Igshaan Adams, ‘Kicking Dust (installation view),’ 2021.

The paths between the sections are desire lines: unplanned footpaths worn by decades of use. Drawn from desire lines between the township suburbs of Langa and Bonteheuwel (where Adams grew up), the paths indicate bridges between these and other communities divided, pitted against each other by the policies of the Apartheid government. The paths log acts of resistance through erosion.

On the walls, we venture from the outside in. Eight tapestries showcase Adams’ handsome, desaturated palette. Oor die Drimpel (Over the Threshold) is patterned with eight-pointed stars on a rust-coloured background. The repetition is interrupted by orange and black marks. Agter Om (Around the Back) is tiled with black lines and diamonds on a white plane; this time, grey and turquoise shapes intrude on the mosaic. These are abstractions of motifs common to the linoleum floors of his youth and their accompanying signs of scuffing and disintegration. Like desire paths, this wear indicates human presence, habit and ritual: the shuffle of feet writing their needs and wants into the ground.

His work notes the similarities between the geometric patterns of ‘tapyt’ and Islamic decorative art, underscoring the link between the intimate domestic sphere and the sublime. The reproduction of imagery that relates to the artist’s faith – as well as his chosen medium, weaving – speak to repetition as meditation. The fact that rugs play a role in Islamic prayer rituals further marries the  medium with Adams’ project, which is to find some kind of enlightenment. He works towards this goal by deconstructing the boundaries imposed by supposedly-mutually-exclusive identifiers. Adams credits his discovery of Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam that emphasises introspection and closeness to God, with an ability to reconcile the different parts of his identity (from his ‘Coloured’ ethnicity and culture, to his Islamic faith, to his queer sexuality). In his work, these are addressed in a manner that is quietly philosophical. Dust, after all, is also the residue of everything: organic fibres, minerals, skin, clothing; the materials of life intermingled.

Igshaan Adams, ‘Kicking Dust (installation view),’ 2021. Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy of Hayward Gallery.

Adding to the sublimity of the show is its cleverly directed lighting. Some areas are spotlit to cast shadows (the ones that gather beneath the ‘wolke’ are dark enough to make you take your washing in), while others are enveloped by an almost religious gloom. In this indoor twilight, photos fail to capture the way the works are animated by subtle glittering. As you move through the space, beads and stones catch the light, so that even the dullest hues twinkle. Frankly, it’s beautiful.

Igshaan Adams, ‘Kicking Dust (installation view),’ 2021. Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy of Hayward Gallery.

Not detracting from the sacred mood, but not adding much either, is Klipgooi (Throwing Stones), a selection of six sculptural forms. They look like tangles of fishing nets that have been dredged from the ocean or the contents of a jewellery box in need of organisation. They are meant to directly convey the dust plumes of the ‘rieldans,’ but they lack the levity or movement that would pull off the visual metaphor.

Nevertheless, ‘Kicking Dust’ is immensely rewarding. The show reflects a process of writing and overwriting, collecting materials and gaining insight between moments of creation and quiet prayer. It offers a sense of the relationship between single lifespan and traditions and aesthetics that have been formed over millennia. Multiple legacies that inform Adams’ identity are acknowledged and then gently eroded, allowing the artist to become himself.

published by Artthrob.co.za on the 11th of March 2021.

Norval Foundation
13.02 - 31.05.2021

David Goldblatt Miner’s bunks in the abandoned Chinese compound…, 1965. Silver gelatin print

It’s the photography that stands out – perhaps because the images are all of people unmasked and pressed together under different circumstances. And when you haven’t seen something for a while, you see it more keenly. Six of the seventeen works in ‘Mixed Company’, a group show at the Norval Foundation curated by Khanya Mashabela, are photographs. It is a small but rich offering spanning from 1942 to the present and combining important historical artists along with younger perspectives on the theme of interpersonal connection.

Jody Brand’s All that you touch you change. All that you change. Changes you. has a yearning quality. The costume-y jewelry and formal dress of the subjects imply a stilted performance of intimacy or an attempt to reconnect. A mother’s hands are folded across her fur stole, and they remain in position, their burgundy nails glistening, as her daughter reaches around to comfort her. The formality of the props and the focus on this small gesture suggests an uneasy relationship.

Three photographs by David Goldblatt document life on the mines in South Africa around 1970.

David Goldblatt The nightshift prepares to go down, 1969. Silver gelatin print

The Nightshift Prepares to Go Down is a detailed image of miners in overalls clambering atop and around metal lifts which hang from chains. Uniformed and in sync they are about to descend against a backdrop of enormous beams. These men form part of the industrial process. The stifling depths and the thunder of machinery implied here, are explicit in the second photograph; a close up of three miners, shoulder-to-shoulder in a confined space. Their lower limbs and faces are consumed by darkness. A lengthy title explains their working conditions:

Sheltering behind his shovel from a stinging gale of grit as the shaft bottom is “blown over” by a man with a compressed air hose. Before drilling of holes for explosives can commence, the bottom must be cleared of grit and pebbles that might conceal sockets containing unexploded charges from the previous round of blasting. Copper is used for the nozzle of the hose so as to avoid sparks that might detonate the explosion of a “misfire”. (1970).

Explosions are one of many potential dangers when pitting flesh and bone against the mineral anatomy of a mine. There is no question, in these situations, in these real-life photographs, that these men were expendable. They were faceless muscle. Tools for extraction. And like tools they were housed without thought for comfort or aesthetics. Goldblatt’s third photograph shows rows of small concrete bunks at an abandoned mine in Germiston. The “beds” look like scaled-up compartments of a printer’s tray. Hanging close by is Gerard Sekoto’s oil painting Workers on a Saturday from 1941, which also shows the communal sleeping arrangements of labourers, but where his brushstrokes convey the lived-in, convivial atmosphere of the dormitory, we do not see Goldblatt’s subjects off-duty. We only know their hive-like efficiency and their solemn regard for the stakes of their work. These images become harder to look at as their content becomes clearer.

Another pair of black and white photographs, larger and crisper than Goldblatt’s are by Musa N. Nxumalo. Vogue nights V  is printed on cloth, its gentle ripple mirrors the silky floral gown worn by the figure at its centre. In a marquee, raised above a mingling crowd, she holds her hands in a pious pose. A flapper-esque rhinestone headdress falls against her features like a veil. In the background is a blurred figure in a white dress. The title invokes high fashion and queer dance culture.

In the second photograph the crowd has coalesced around the figure. People whoop into cupped hands, gawking, mesmerised. The performer has turned and slid the gown down to reveal a glistening black spine and the T of a leopard print thong. A drag-queen in a satiny wedding dress and tiara sings or announces the transformation. The verdict is in the title: 10! 10! 10! (2020). These images contain the DNA of the nightclub, they are heady, sweaty, brimming with excitement and sexuality. Nxumalo has joined the baton bearers for monochromatic nightclub photography, after the likes of Dianne Arbus and Billy Monk, as well as photographers such as Santu Mofokeng, whose mode of fine-art cum photo-journalism  challenged conceptions of Black people by presenting them with honesty and agency.

Musa N. Nxumalo. Vogue nights V

Because of the events of 2020, many of the photographs exhibited in ‘Mixed Company’ exert a startling truth value. Their content, whether real or staged, represented a moment in time – which viewed through the lens of COVID 19 – contains latent information about how we interacted not so long ago. When history happens so quickly we become aware of the parts of our lives that might only have been of interest to historians.

Many interactions in all their newly-outlawed, virus-spreading intimacy are also catalogued in drawings by Selby Mvusi, Leonard Matsoso and Omar Badsha, as well as in Dada Khanyisa’s, An Underrated Form of Intimacy – a multimedia relief work with the instantly-accessible entertainment-value of reality TV, which shows the interactions of six stylish party-goers.

Looking more like the parents’ carpet after a house party, the aftermath of all this revelry can be seen in Kresiah Mukwazhi’s Chemical Reactions – a title that implies you wouldn’t want to see it under a black light. It is a bolt of 222 x 335cm fabric dotted with tinsel, Zimbabwean dollar bills and sequined material. Among haphazard splashes of colour are suggestions of figures. Because there isn’t a single orderly element to signal that the chaos is intentional, the work appears buckled and bedraggled and it contains a brashness at odds with the fragile connectedness many of the other works hold dear.

A set of three John Muafangejo woodcuts evoke the feeling of belonging in a crowd. The rhythmic repetition of figures transforms them into a throng with a singular purpose. Some drink together around a large vessel, some worship before a weeping priest and some admire a posse of well dressed women. The lines Muafangejo carved between the figurative elements connote the flow of attention, attraction and conversation.

John Ndevasia Muafangejo Eros activity centre, 1985. Linocut on paper

Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi paints gymnasts in a huddle in Ceremony. The figures’ group-hug is a parable of solidarity in the context of an individual sport, especially gymnastics, a sport that the world didn’t associate with people of colour until Simone Biles.

Yet the subjects of these works are not the subjects of the show, which is arguably how experience changes when it is shared. The circumstances of the relationships shown in Mixed Company are secondary to the fact that they are in-person relationships. They show what happens when people share space. What happens when you work next to someone, knowing their strengths and weaknesses as they know yours, when you delegate memories to your partner, when you lock eyes with someone, when you feel the chemistry of a room heaving with people. It is also about the chemistry between the works which together paint a picture of the many forms relationships take. ‘Mixed Company’ asks us to remember ourselves as we were in company, because we will be again.

A review by Isabella Kuijers on Artthrob.co.za on the 12th of October 2020.

Goodman Gallery
03.09 - 26.09.2020

For Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, the creation of an alter-ego happened early in her career, when borrowing images from historic sources brought up uncomfortable questions about ‘using’ the subjects for her own message. And so ‘Asme’ (name gleefully appropriated from a manufacturer of sanitary fittings as seen in a public bathroom) was conceived. She became the vehicle for self expression without vanity and portrayal of black bodies without re-instrumentalisation. This is why the faces that gaze down from the work in her solo exhibition, ‘Battlecry’, at the Goodman Gallery in London, all share an arresting resemblance; they are made literally in her image.

These faces live within seven large figurative works. Her move away from flimsy, bleached-white paper and onto unprimed wood lends them a softness which (because of the veiny woodgrain) has a warm fleshy quality, or the feel of an olden-day manuscript. That she leaves areas to show through, allows the medium to actually stand-in for areas of skin or sky. Working on such sturdy ground has enabled Sunstrum to collage large panels without the material buckling so that these works have the scale and weight of altar-pieces. They bring to mind the ‘Stations of the Cross’ from my Catholic upbringing. Another addition to her practice is the use of acrylics and oil paints (paired here with coloured pencils) which she wields like a draftsperson, mapping and washing in areas, often leaving a faint palimpsest gesturing in the direction a drawing might have gone.

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum Trooper, 2020. Pencil and oil on wood panels

In Trooper this is how she handles her subject’s clothing. The woman, who stands as tall as the picture plane, gathering her hem, leaves loose a layered cascade of fabric. Multiple skirts imply that the one stands for the many. The action of pulling up one’s skirt is ambiguous. It may be a gesture of sexual acquiescence or of readiness to ‘get stuck in’. Across the image, in enormous serif font are repetitions of the clause: ‘to the stars’. The words are from a quote in the essay Why Do I Write? by South African author, Bessie Head, which reads: ‘I am building a stairway to the stars. I have the authority to take the whole of mankind up there with me. That is why I write.’ Perhaps the work for which the Trooper is preparing is to gather her people in the make-shift basin of her skirts and ascend to the heavens. That Trooper fits the saviour/hero archetype is further reinforced by a red halo of pencil swipes.

The impulse to go ‘to the stars’ is to go in the opposite direction of Trooper’s symbolically charged geological landscape. The land is pimpled with overactive volcanoes that signal tensions reaching the point of explosion. An adjacent work also finds its setting along this fault line as three volcanoes spew malevolent smoke in the background of The Seven. In the foreground seven impervious figures are posed in two rows. The dull green of the linework and navy of their attire (which hark back to the monotones of daguerreotypes) are outshone by their scorchingly pink heads. Their eyes are blank and appraising but the heat of their skin evinces pressure building and magma gurgling in the distance. The Seven has its beginnings in an 2018 Artpace residency in Texas, where Sunstrum was afforded the resources to set up a regency-style photographic studio in which to pose as variants of Asme. The photographs percolated in her atelier until, for The Seven, they were collaged together to become an assembly of ancestors. Each of the women in The Seven is an ambassador for a facet of Sunstrum’s own identity, showing how she uses her alter ego as a heuristic; a prism that allows her to splinter into a rainbow of archetypes.

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum The Seven, 2020. Pencil and oil on wood panels

Each self she kits out, enjoying the textures, patterns, ruffles and motifs of ‘the Empire’, but there is also Americana from Sunstrums adopted continent in the exhibition (stiff leather cowboy boots, bison) and from Southern Africa (ostriches, blue gum trees). She is playful about boundary-crossing saying that, both literally and metaphorically, the works show her ‘as an insider and an outsider in every place [she’s] ever been’.

The staged-ness of the scene in The Seven recollects the way early anthropological photography was concerned with recording new knowledge, thus making the first wave of sitters ambassadors for their ‘type’. In a history of anthropological photography, Douglas Harper writes:

In its initial phase, anthropological photography was considered a scientific tool used to gather objective data, rather than as travel or adventure memoirs, as had been the case in colonial photography. The irony of the early anthropological photography […] is that the precise and ‘objective’ pictures of body types and shapes supported theories consistent with colonial ideology, such as Social Darwinism, that are now wholly rejected. It is now precisely the subjectivity of these photos that attracts contemporary interest.

This is precisely where Sunstrum and other artists come in, trying in their way, to acknowledge and to mend. Sunstrum describes giving her figures their unyielding, knowing, open expressions as a way of ‘offering back privacy’ by allowing them scepticism of the process by which they were (and are) recorded.

In the The Two I & II, twin renderings of herself sit on adjacent panels, their postures are mirror images and each has a raptor perched on her arm.  She invites us to play ‘spot-the-difference’ with this kind of work. One figure sits on chequered tiles, the other straddles a seascape, one wears a skirt and feather-capped sleeves, the other has on a striped, masculine ensemble. Both look ever-so-slightly pained at their separation from the other. Sunstrum describes them as lovers (which makes it seem cruel that they are not conjoined and could find themselves sold to different homes).

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, The Knitter, 2020. Pencil and oil on wood panels

The Knitter gives us a elderly woman who weaves the universe. In Rider a cavalrywoman urges her bison steed onward. Grandpères shows enantiomer time-travellers between the ships of the past and the modular homes of the future. All in all, we have the mother, the lovers, the twins, the soldier, the hero and the ancestors. Sunstrum’s employment of such generalities makes her work widely accessible and readable but I wondered whether she worries that, for example, The Knitter, in which she wraps an effigy of her mother (recently claimed by cancer) in a cloak of foliage and credits her with making her world, might be read as simply the ‘mother nature’ trope with none of the work’s heartbreaking specificity. I asked Sunstrum whether she is concerned that her use of archetype could spill over into stereotype. Her answer is no, which she explained by saying that although it is something she thinks about, ‘archetypes are so useful and powerful because they are recognisable. They are notes to ourselves and to others. [And so pervasive that] We assign every person in our lives [an archetype].’ Perhaps it is her appropriation of archetypal imagery that makes decoding the work so rewarding, because it connects with the viewer on an intuitive and an intellectual level. That she then further imbues the works with her own symbolic language offers rich alternative readings.

Altogether the archetypes are a way of writing herself (as a black woman) into characters that have been predominantly ‘Western’. In her essay in AFRICAN FUTURES (2016), Sunstrum writes:

My work […] features a female figure who often stands in as the archetypal hero on a quest through landscapes that carry various significations: landscapes of discovery, of conquest, of self-sacrifice, of self-mythology, landscapes in the pursuit of home. I am interested in reclaiming and re-ordering narratives of power via an imaginative or speculative occupation of geographies (space) and histories (time).

Rather than criticizing archetypes, Sunstrum offers a wider audience self-identification with them and provides an invitation for hybridity in our thinking about the hero’s journey.

An essay by Isabella Kuijers - Published on Artthrob.co.za on 25th of August 2020.

Is the self always present in what one makes? Am I trailing pieces of myself? Short answer: Yes. Silvery hairs that knit bird’s nests under the furniture, an unending squall of search terms, CCTV, God forbid droplets of aerosolized spittle. And so are you. We’re just snagging on things, leaving remnants behind, like lambs wool on barbed wire.

Sometimes in art, we find forensic traces of the artist. The handprints of hunter gatherers in the Sulawesi Caves (from c.37 900 BCE, the oldest of their kind) or the painters whose visual anomalies unintentionally altered their work (Monet, cataracts). Other times the clues are more qualitative, like the stylistic ‘family resemblance’ of works by any one person. During the Renaissance, the popular belief was that ‘every painter paints himself’, later mirrored in literature by the refrain ‘all writing is autobiography.’

In the 3rd Century AD Plotinus gives us the first philosophical appraisal of self-portraiture. In The Self Portrait: A Cultural History, James Hall writes that Plotinus ‘believed that self-portraits are produced not by looking out at a mirror, but by withdrawing into the self.’ Plotinus wrote,

‘Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work.’

This is a interrogatory process-based idea of the self-portrait, in which we sense the artist’s pursuit of betterment and self-understanding. Maybe even of self-care.

During the initial stage of the COVID-19 Lockdown, Cape Town-based Georgina Gratrix, produced a self-portrait daily for 63 days. Each day remaking herself anew. I view the work on Instagram at @gggratrix (surely an ‘online viewing room’ now that we’ve started bandying about that term). There is a sense of this series being part of an appropriate social media presence – with references to her pets, make-up, and pantsless (hee hee) zoom meetings. The parts of life we expect to see mediated through Instagram.

April 22nd’s face peers out from behind a sunlight-soap-green facemask with holes for Gratrix’s features (including two sets of eyes). The aperture for the mouth seems to smile but her own pouted lips curve downward in an expression of annoyance. The facemask, the very symbol of self-care with its promises of Q10 and smoothing serums, clearly isn’t cutting it. Perhaps we’re still cooling off from April 17. On that day (face livid orange and black, teeth bared, eyes rolling) the portrait is captioned: ‘when someone forgets the shopping bags or actually when people complain on the community Facebook page that nightly clapping for healthcare workers disrupts their children’s sleeping patterns.’

Gratrix is known for oil paintings so heavily layered that probably none of them are dry. She teases out enormous gloopy bouquets, parodies her friends and sends up stereotypes such as the ’TV Detective’, the ‘married woman’ or ‘The Belgian Collector’ in bright, hasty colour with rashes of extra eyes blistering across their pudgy mugs. The parade of lockdown self-portraits uses watercolour rather than oil but retains her squelchy womanly sensibility. They are the progeny of Argus and a buxom Irma Stern. Expressionistic in the most literal sense, these direct and intimate close-ups plot the emotional rollercoaster of lockdown, like diary entries, describing the trending claustrophobia, stir-craziness …  an occasional good day.

Many, including the last (May 31st), show another increasingly-familiar mask: the face-covering used to reduce transmission of the virus. Her face and the mask are almost identical shades of fuchsia; almost one thing. The mask is transparent so that her expression is unmuzzled. She seems fine, nearly smiling, having perhaps adjusted. These paintings are cheerfully coloured and briskly rendered, but as with all self portrayals they are introspective. They log Gratrix’s intermittent unravelling and pulling oneself back together and bring to mind a line from Paul Simon’s Hearts and Bones in which a pair of acquaintances ‘step out occasionally and speculate who had been damaged the most.’

Not everyone has been so obliging when it comes to masking up. On the same day, May 31, Shane Malone is over-dressed for a grubby supermarket aisle in a grey suit and white shirt. He jauntily pulls the breast of his blazer over his face, dark glasses peering over the lapel. The caption reads: ‘The only mask I’ll ever use’.

Shane is contrarian. Pitching himself as a successful, well-connected art dealer, he preaches the gospel of how to hand out business cards and close deals, rounding out the image with hair gel, braggadocio and a gold chain. His Instagram (@shane_yes_shane) catalogues twin obsessions: himself, and his work. That work, a vocation that he lives and breathes, is promoting the photographs of Russell Bruns, an emerging (what does that even mean anymore) photographer from Johannesburg. Where Russell is self-effacing, Shane espouses self-help truisms. Where Russell is content to labour behind the lens, Shane is pleased to be papped. In fact he is photographed with Russell’s work in international locations from the pavement outside the V&A Museum to the arrivals lounge at Cape Town airport to Bruges, Paarl, Swansea, Muizenberg. And the ‘real’ exhibitions are stacking up too. Shane has “shown” Russell’s work at Zietz MOCCA in the group shoup ‘The Main Complaint’ and as part of a residency programme at Cultureland in Amsterdam, both in 2019.

In an Instagram post from 2018 Shane kneels in the shadow of Robert Therrien’s Table and Four Chairs in the Tanks, holding one of Bruns’ photographs. Dwarfed in size but not ego, the pic is captioned: ‘Group Show with Robert Therrien @tate. Always happy to offer other artists a platform for exposure. #strongertogether #givingback #probono #roberttherrien #tatemodern #seatedbyshane’. The photograph he is holding is of a sunset in pale lilacs, blues and oranges. It references the cover image of Roe Ethridge’s artist book, Shelter Island. Like much of Brun’s work it is poignantly mundane and in the Wolfgang Tilmans lineage. Other works show tragically ordinary tableaus. A hurried working class breakfast of pink yoghurt and banana or a thoughtlessly arranged desk.

In another post from 2019 a screenshot of Shane’s sms inbox shows a brief exchange with Larry Gagosian: ‘Hey Shane, all the best for 2019. Let me know when you have a moment to talk business. Send my love to Andy. Lazza’ to which Shane replies ‘Out of office!!!’ In another tab Elon asks ‘you back boet?’ He is left hanging. Shame. The comparison between Bruns’s understated photography and Shane’s narcissistic presentation is absurd.

It turns out that in art, unlike in life, I like to be lied to – because Shane himself is a mask; a gauche and inscrutable persona. It isn’t immediately obvious, because of the way a social media avatar is now shorthand for a whole person, but he is a creation of Bruns. Perhaps he began as an attempt to address the absurd demands of the art industry in which one is expected to balance being an artist (engaging sensitively and earnestly with your work) and being a salesperson (building hype and mystique). Like Larry Bell, of the Light and Space art movement in 1960s Los Angeles, whose alter ego Biluxo Benoni (aka Dr. Lux) enabled him to exude confidence and charisma he was otherwise lacking, Shane addresses this paradox of self-representation. He allows Russell to armour up with a metonymic compartmentalisation of self – which has grown into its own enigmatic personality.

But Shane is also a device; an entertaining mechanism to funnel attention towards the photography. Bait and switch. To this point Bruns asks: ‘How do we use photography to look at certain issues – when photography is the issue. Because now photography is the everyday, I needed to do something to re-engage the viewer’. At his Cultureland show he transformed into Shane in the gallery. The metamorphosis involved a full length mirror and an entire can of deodorant. The spectacle turns a gallery space and the artworks therein (where the rules are well understood) into something new that demands inquisitiveness and reevaluation.

We see in even the most elaborately constructed self-portrayals, psychological stowaways and unintentional honesty. In paediatric nursing, children’s drawings of themselves are observed to change based on feelings of anxiety and depression. And in the case of eating-disorder patients, self-portraiture can be a useful tool for carers to gauge self-perception as it may differ from actual body composition. Phenomenons that allow self-portraiture to be a useful (if open-to-interpretation) diagnostic tool. In contrast, Hall writes that ‘Self-portraiture in the twentieth century[‘s] most distinctive quality is its tendency to conceal or suppress the face and head, thereby thwarting traditional physiognomic/phrenological readings. Masks, mask-like faces and masquerade are a typical trademark of the modern self-portrait.’ Hall suggests a will to show, but not too much, a dance of disclosure that can be seen in the work of Gratrix and Bruns. Balancing fiction with confession and ego with identity.

A feature on Artthrob by Isabella Kuijers on the 12th of May 2020. 

‘Superstition brings bad luck.’ That’s James Webb quoting Raymond Smullyan as he is taking a walk around a Lake in Sweden. I’m on the phone to him from my kitchen in Putney deconstructing a chicken. Tellingly I can’t find the wishbone. I think I sliced through it.

We’re talking about the way ideas become artworks. I’m circling concepts of distillation and layering of symbols. But an unknown force is guiding me in a different direction. Maybe it is the same vague sense of unease that is pushing me (and seemingly everyone else) to take on more and more elaborate cooking tasks. I find myself interrupting and asking about the elements of his work that gesture towards the numinous presence of fate or magic or chance.

James Webb ‘What Fresh Hell is This’, Installation View

His current show ‘What Fresh Hell Is This’, at blank projects in Woodstock, incorporates its most overt element of the supernatural through a piece called The Skipping Needle in which Webb consulted with an astrologer to determine a cosmically appropriate time to close the gallery. The astrologer mandated it be shut for a period of 30 hours and 42 minutes based on a triangulation of itinerant planets. Perhaps saying it should be shut almost permanently in line with government/coronavirus lockdown was too risky a prophecy (albeit one that would have bolstered the profession).

There’s a wry sense of irony that sits somewhat uncomfortably with Webb’s genuine absorption and enjoyment of the occult and mysterious. Perhaps it’s their contrast with his near-mathematically minimalist presentation. Interestingly the realms of Physics and Maths have long been dogged by associations with the occult due to Johann Zöllner’s ‘Transcendental Physics’,¹ a text in which he used the idea of a fourth dimension as a way of explaining the impressive illusions of magician and charlatan Henry Slade in 1879. This example serves to emphasize just how much of our intellectual (as well as emotional) endeavour is abstract and ephemeral. Some (if not all) numbers are imaginary.

Webb’s appeal to the supernatural realm is emblematic of his attempts to conjure the realization that this isn’t it; that there is more here than that which we can sense or explain. Previous titles, such as There Is a Voice Other Than the One You’re Hearing, I Do Not Live in This World Alone, but in a Thousand Worlds and The Dreamer in Me Meets the Dreamer in You, poetically suggest that real experience spills beyond physical reality, like love emerging from sex or dreams from sleep.

In his process, Webb disregards scepticism so that his experiments can run their course, it is a simulation that, technically real or not, yields results. Like Nobel-prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr’s lucky horseshoe (apparently when asked by a fellow scientist why he kept it above his door, he rebuked ‘I don’t believe in it either. I have it there because I was told that it works even when one doesn’t believe in it at all’). At this point I am also reminded of Rosa Lyster’s zodiac sign profiles². I re-read all of them. They have titles like: ‘Astrology Is Fake, But Brad Pitt Got Owned By A Gemini’, ‘Astrology is Fake but Pisceans Love Weed’ and ‘Astrology Is Fake But Sagittariuses [like James Webb] Are Trying Their Best’.

It makes sense that no one is more superstitious than the seafarer; he who gives himself (women were bad luck) over to the whims of the weather and the waves. And so tempestuous was the rounding of the Cape that a monstrous demigod, Adamastor, was invented by Luís de Camões in 1572 to personify the wreck-hungry seas at the tip of Africa.

James Webb, This is where I leave you (Mary of shipwrecks. Terms of surrender), 2020. Wrought-iron Madonna statue, vitrine, plinth (detail)

Webb’s work This is Where I Leave You comprises statues in vitrines made of clear fluted glass. The corrugations distort the figurines – some are of the Virgin Mary and the Buddha – making them appear shimmering theological visions. They relate to the shipwreck of the Nossa Senhora dos Milagros (Portuguese for ‘Our Lady of Miracles’) which foundered among the many carcasses of merchant ships just off Struisbaai. Thinking they had passed the Cape, the crew turned too early and the ship was wrecked in 1686. As well as a cargo of jewels and spices, the ship carried religious envoys of ‘French Catholic priests sent to study the astronomy of SouthEast Asia, as well as a group of Siamese Buddhist monks’ on a journey from Goa to Lisbon. Apparently clergymen are also bad luck, and given the moniker ‘Jonahs’.

Survivors made it to shore and trekked to the VOC settlement in the Cape. The passage was perilous and the survivors were so hungry and exposed that ‘the Mandarins were compelled to eat their shoes’. The artwork’s title This is Where I Leave You sees the journeys of the items left on the ship diverge from those of the travellers. Some found themselves at the bottom of the ocean while others were salvaged by the Dutch East India Company. A gold cross embedded with diamonds, a silver filigree scent ball and a rosary were stolen by Lieutenant Olaf Bergh of the VOC and sold to an unknown Capetonian (Bergh was detained on Robben Island for his crime). Webb’s vitrines present us with figures chosen for their relevance to the parties on the ship and their ideologies. Ambassadors, maybe even distant cousins, representing secret voyages and faith kept.

James Webb A series of personal questions addressed to five litres of Nigerian crude oil , 2020. Crude oil, glass, speaker, audio, installation

The theme of experience, memory and wisdom being actively present in inanimate objects carries through into A Series of Personal Questions Addressed to Five Liters of Nigerian Crude Oil, the latest in a series of such interviews. The oil and all of its embedded memories fill a glass cube which is interrogated by a disembodied voice. The questions relate to the experience of the oil, it’s origin story and how it feels about its change of location. Among the 107 questions are: ‘What do you remember of prehistoric sunlight?’, ‘What can you tell us about the underworld?’ And ‘What will yet surface that we have not anticipated?’

Kathryn Smith writes that ‘the artwork proposes that each object is more than the sum of its parts’ in an essay in ‘…’, Webb’s new monograph. Stacks of the books are drumming their fingers impatiently at the gallery – their coming-out party absorbed into the disappointing parade of shut-downs. The crude oil has waited since the Mesozoic era to say its piece – it doesn’t mind a few more weeks.

Another of Blank Project’s artists layering unseen dimensions into their work is Donna Kukama. Kukama’s text-covered canvases are the result of secretive performances which leave their traces in her list of materials; coded unassumingly into the information about the artworks. Where one expects to see only a date, size and ‘oil on canvas’, Kusama includes ‘sunshine’ or ‘curses’. I missed them the first two times that I perused the catalogue of her show ‘Mooood’, held in 2019.

The repetition of white on black has the look of the chalkboard about it, evincing the repetitive detention punishment that Bart Simpson performs in every Simpsons intro and John Baldessari’s I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art³(clearly incantations can take banal and punitive forms). Her coiled cursive script is meditatively repetitive, looping widely so that the letters link arms and create a chicken-wire mesh. The visual effect and her poetic register rely on language to both conjure and to create a defence of the works’. Uniting Kukama and Webb is an appreciation of language’s ability to change gear, to present a picture of the world as different from day-to-day vernacular as scientific jargon. They implore a way of thinking that is also a way of feeling and believing.

As a result of Zöllner’s book, Einstein was at first unwilling to call what we now accept as the fourth dimension (spacetime) by that title. Kukama’s works occupy this literal fourth dimension in that she considers her artworks dynamic across time. On the surface a text requires a different kind of time and attention than does an image, but further than that she considers them able to figuratively time travel, to jump between moments and reactivate them. She describes her words as: ‘thoughts that act as tools for transporting (myself) between past and present, and at other times for imagining futures. Sometimes I see them as a series of events where I can arrive at a point where time is flattened, and other less visible interventions can take place and travel with the work.’

Donna Kukama Sizobaloya kwa Mai-Mai 2019. Graphite, oil pastel, acrylic, spells and smoke on canvas

Her work Sizobaloya kwa Mai-Mai (which is made up of ‘Graphite, oil pastel, acrylic, spells and smoke on canvas’) translates to ‘We will cast spells on them (from) Kwa Mai-Mai.’ (Kwa Mai-Mai being a well known muti-market in Johannesburg, with healers’ consultation rooms on-site). In this work Kukama revisits Miriam Makeba’s 1963 song ‘Dubula’, an anti-Apartheid track with a celebratory danceable rhythm. In the chorus Makeba’s sunny operatic voice sings ‘Sizoba dubula nge mbayimbayi’, isiXhosa for ‘we will shoot them with a rifle’. Like Webb’s interrogated objects, Kukama sees the song as something with desire and agency. She muses:

Where would [this song] time-travel to? Where would it find collaborators? What would it take away? Most importantly, how would it transform, and what weapon would it use? Those who can read into the title’s references and “invisible” material can access the work at a different level. Not everyone is meant to go there. The spell is produced through time-travel and reorganizing desires for revenge, in forms that disarm all types of fuckery without always being “seen”.

I don’t speak isiXhosa, so I didn’t initially comprehend the lyrics – in this case I am ignorant of the full rationale of the work not because of secrecy but access. An access that is immediately granted to those who remember the music and speak the language. In this way she encodes an ardently political message within the work’s restrained palette and benignly contemporary abstraction.

In our email exchanges, I often felt like I was asking someone who had just blown out their birthday candles what they wished for, suspecting that if they told me it wouldn’t come true. Good-naturedly, Kukama would not budge on the form her process takes. She told me what I already knew, that the works provide ‘A key into a world that [viewers] may not access?’ I bump up against the limits of my lexicon as an art journalist, asking for DISTILLATION, REDUCTION, EXPLANATION. But with this vocabulary I became the enemy of the numinous by demanding to know how it works (I had come armed with words like ‘palimpsest’ but nothing that could stand in for ‘God’ or ‘magic’). I felt hypocognitive ⁴ – a fascinating example of language shaping our reality. I consider that perhaps our appropriation of terms relating to the magical or religious are ways of trying to pin down abstract experience through language, trying to grasp the diaphanous will-o-the-wisps of the world that elude us. ‘As cognitive psychology affirms, having a verbal label can distill a nebulous phenomenon into an experience that’s more immediate and concrete.’

The mingling of castaways and colonists at the Cape is only the tip of South Africa’s theological and cosmological bounty and as such there is an abundance of artists incorporating the ‘holy’, ‘magical’ and ‘superstitious’ into their work. From Mary Sabande’s purple plushies and Penny Siopis’s retelling of the frightening urban legend, Pinky Pinky, to Roger Ballen’s wretched and brooding photographs that delve into the unrepressed human psyche. From Buhlebezwe Siwani’s incorporation of her practice as a Sangoma into her work to Sabelo Mlungeni poignant photographs of the Church of Zion. From Dineo Bopape’s intuitively produced landscapes to Willem Boshoff’s carpentry crucifixes and druidic practice. And perhaps our most famously divinely-inspired artist, Jackson Hlungwani, whose church ‘Yesu Galeliya One Aposto in Sayoni Alt and Omega’ melded his Tsonga heritage with devout and playful christianity. As exemplified in art the unlikely emergence of Consciousness, Language, Religion, Imagination, Humour, Dreams and Hallucinations make up an altogether a paranormal synergy that reminds me of a quote by neuroscientist Paul Broks: ‘When we see the brain we realize that we are, at one level, no more than meat; and, on another, no more than fiction.’ I think it should be changed to: ‘…at one level, no more than meat; and, on another, no more than magic.’

An online exhibition curated by Isabella Kuijers

28.05.2020

Each of us has our own story about how COVID-19 and the lockdown has affected our lives and routines. In the case of the artists featured here, all were scheduled to have exhibitions with the Association for Visual Arts (AVA) in Cape Town and have had their (our) shows postponed. In the art community working from home has practical implications for producing work and may have impacted the privacy, scale, and materials available to artists. With so much of our lives effectively on hold and so many constraints on the production of art, the idea for an imaginary exhibition was conceived - one without limitation. Artists were encouraged to submit maquettes, mock-ups, sketches or descriptions of a work that wouldn’t normally come to fruition. The reason for the work’s non-existence could be as simple as cost or size or as exotic as societal taboos, uninvented technology, or the laws of physics.  

This posed its own challenges, like a sport, the medium of choice for artists restricts and provides a structure for the form the work will take. Floating in the realm of endless possibility can be daunting. But perhaps, as is the case of Bradley Flynn’s non-work, the thought process itself is the artistic process. Flynn circles the concept of exhibiting non-existence which eventually short-circuits and cancels itself out in a paradox.

Paradox, Bradley Flynn, 2020

For Fernão Cruz and Horácio Frutuoso this was an opportunity to toy with the diaphanous quality of air in the form of skywriting and bubble blowing. They show an unimpeded form of levity and play in art. While in weighty opposition to these works is Elgin Rust’s Giant Wings, enormous versions of flotation devices for children that would inevitably end in drowning. Giant Wings follows on from Rust’s other works in which she casts ‘inflatables’ in concrete and other heavy materials. The sense of familiarity with objects such as ‘water wings’ is so sinisterly at odds with the physical properties of her works. These were proposed to a concrete 3D printing company in 2018 but were too complex to print at the time.

Exhibit 1: An Appeal by Horácio Frutuoso

Exhibit 2: A Pipe by Fernão Cruz

Giant Wings by Elgin Rust

Phillip Steele’s work Billboard Maquette (Red) is also outsized, a billboard in the tradition of 90’s Cuban artist, Félix González-Torres, whose work propelled LGBT images and messaging into the public sphere. Steele aims to preempt protections for queer people, writing that “if my existence is acknowledged, and not silenced, my human rights are better protected. He who controls public space controls commemoration—and in doing so controls history and memory.” Steele’s concern is that when images of marginalised communities are absent from the present, they are more likely to disappear from historical stories of our time. However, he recognises that the primary reason his work would struggle to come to fruition is the taboos surrounding the naked male body. In many spaces, both online and offline, censorship of full-on male nudity is standard. The work asks us to think about what would be acceptable on a billboard - especially when female bodies are so often exposed as part of advertising and art.

Billboard Maquette (Red) by Philip Steele

Untitled by King Debs

King Debs’ untitled work is also billboard-like, depicting a glowing rectangle marked with an ‘X’. The scene, which is watched by three shadowy forms, shows “a unique event with profound consequences [-] a technological singularity. That seemingly impossible moment is manifested by the ‘X’ symbol at the focal point of the image. This is an imaginary state where machines surpass human intelligence and become so advanced that they gain consciousness.” The use of light, a glowing emergence in the darkness, indicates that we will watch as something terrifyingly brilliant bootstraps itself out of our technological quagmire. King Debs’ vision of a possible future frames it as not just an unseen ordinary moment but a revelation. Here the ‘X’ is a placeholder for something impossible to describe; a signature; a treasure trove.

Two photographic collages show iterations of Michelle Marcuse’s cardboard sculptures. In photoshop, Marcuse composed, distorted, and combined photographs of previous physical works, placing them in extraordinary or impossible positions. The sparkling light and the way the constructions hang delicately in space has an enchanted feeling, Marcuse writes: “I have given them a quality which I find arising in my early morning half wake/sleep states where anything seems possible.” They have the look of trojan horses or hard-edge spiders nests about them.

Untitled by Michelle Marcuse

Linger 1 by Isabella Kuijers

My (Isabella Kuijers) own works, Linger 1 and 2, are about touch and absence. In the first work I envision a room filled by a grid of pillars (made of soil, wire and plastic sheeting) with the plant Mimosa Pudica growing out of the pillars. Mimosa is a weed in South Africa and is often called the ‘shame plant’ because it recoils from touch as a way of avoiding predation. As participants enter the room and walk into the dense foliage, the plants will retreat, a parting will open behind them and gradually close up again. In Linger 2 I would require not-yet-available medical technology. I imagine a work where long grafts of scalp are kept alive (and producing hair) above a door frame. The hair would grow down creating a curtain that would have to be touched or pushed aside to enter. These ideas are a response to the way touch is being appreciated as such a precious commodity now that so many of us are experiencing physical separation as part of Lockdown.

Linger 2 by Isabella Kuijers

In more direct response to the current pandemic is Tangeni Kambudu’s Fuck Jean-Paul Mira & Camille Locht. Jean-Paul Mira (the head of the intensive care unit at the Cochin Hospital in Paris) and Camille Locht (research director of France’s national health institute) proposed that Vaccines for COVID-19 be tested on Africans in an interview for French Television.  

Mira asked: “If I could be provocative, should we not do this study in Africa where there are no masks, treatment or intensive care, a little bit like it’s done, by the way, for certain AIDS studies or with prostitutes?”  

“We try things because we know that they are highly exposed and they don’t protect themselves,” he said.  

Camille Locht, responded: “You are right. And by the way, we are in the process of thinking in parallel about a study in Africa … That doesn’t prevent us, in parallel, from also thinking about a study in Europe and in Australia.” (Reuters)  

Thankfully, the response has been one of revulsion and denouncement. “Africa isn’t a testing lab,” tweeted Ivory Coast soccer star, Didier Drogba. “I would like to vividly denounce those demeaning, false and most of all deeply racist words.”  There is a long disturbing history of using disempowered demographics as lab rats. Probably the most famous recent example is that of the ‘Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male’ which only ended in 1972 (not even a generation ago). In this study rural African-American men with syphilis were observed (and left deliberately untreated) in the USA. Many more examples exist but another important instance of African instrumentalisation is the case of Henrietta Lacks in 1955. A poor African-American from Baltimore, Henrietta’s cells were the first to be successfully cultured for use in medical research. The cells came from tissue samples obtained without consent, and, now known by the shorthand HeLa cells, have been important for the production of the polio vaccine, cancer research, AIDS research, gene mapping, and other scientific advances. Neither she, nor her family, were compensated for her contribution.  

In it’s over-the-top lavish conception the work rages against viewing Africans as disposable human test-subjects in the fight to protect the lives of Europeans. When asked why the work is imaginary Kambudu pens a list of almost impossible criteria for its production: The 260cm×300cm one-piece wood will be cut in Germany, The hand-engravings are done by artisans in Yemen, The frame is hand-made by artisans in Mongolia, The General Sherman Tree is only found in USA. Adding finally that: “An AFRICAN came up with the concept”.

Fuck Jean-Paul Mira & Camille Locht by Tangeni Kambudu  

The Imaginary Exhibition will continue to exist and grow in a virtual space until one day we can make it a reality…

A review published on Artthrob.co.za on the 30th of January 2020. 

Isabella Kuijers

Zeitz MOCAA - 21.11.19-23.02.20

Otobong Nkanga’s ‘Acts at the Crossroads’ at Zeitz MOCAA is a survey exhibition of works drawn from the artist’s output over the last twenty years. Nkanga is a multi-disciplinary artist born in Nigeria, who focuses on the connections and relationships that shape the world. In placard form her artist statement might read: Interdependence not independence!

She goes about demonstrating this thesis statement in literal ways, producing works like Social Consequences II, a landscape composition divided into six panels. Each panel details a step in a process of what might be gas or mineral extraction. One shows a scattering of buildings, sharp points protrude from the buildings, pricking the backs of a gathering of black women in the next panel. These women turn a crank that powers a set of levers, pulleys and human arms that transport rock from within the earth into grey canisters in the next panel. The final panel shows liquid seeping out of the canisters into a delta of tiny streams.

Otobong Nkanga Social Consequences II, 2009. Stickers, acrylic on paper

Social Consequences II uses the visual register of educational schematics. The colour swatch ‘legends’ found in her margins and the cool flat tones used in her drawings prime the viewer to search for information. In this case it is a metonymic flowchart showing the migration of mine workers, the social, familial impact and the environmental toll of mining on earth and bodies. Interestingly, for a static image, adverbs are as important as the figures and the objects. Pains are taken to guide the focus of the viewer along the chain of causal relationships; from the fact that the tableau happens from left to right like the written word, to the use of diagrammatic arrows and pointers.

It is in this sparing, collected manner that she references Nigeria’s militarized and polluted Niger Delta, into which an average of 240,000 barrels of crude oil are spilled every year. Writing about Nkanga’s work, curator and critic Philippe Pirotte notes that: ‘Competition for oil wealth, which forms part of an ongoing “scramble for Africa”, has fuelled most of the violence, but the conflict is also symptomatic of a clash of opposing world-views…[a] level of abstraction brings to mind the legacy of colonial mapping.’ Resource extraction has environmental and human costs that are externalized from the cost of the oil itself – Nkanga’s work asks us to consider this.

Nkanga’s drawings ideologically align with Actor-Network Theory (ANT), a tool for conceptualizing systems that was developed in the 1980s and associated with sociologists such as Bruno Latour. In ANT, human and non-human entities are considered ‘actors’ and are situated within complex webs of relational ties. What makes his conceptualization contentious, but also useful in understanding Nkanga’s oeuvre, is the idea that all actors are understood to have agency; the ability to exert influence. This is not necessarily attributing intentionality or higher order functioning to animals, inanimate objects or technologies, but rather to say that they are not passive. It is a mode of thinking that contradicts Modernism in that it asserts that human analytical rationality is not an outside force parsing the world; but integrated with and subject to the world. For example, the way oil behaves in the world or how some minerals garner awe and evade ownership.

It is useful as a standard for non-anthropocentric thinking as it marks a departure from our exclusive concern with human subjectivity and rejects the dualism of human/non-human categories. The reason for ANT’s symmetrical approach to human and non-human actors is that the differences (in value and agency) between actors are generated and perceived within a particular system and should not be presupposed.

Otobong Nkanga Taste of a Stone, 2010. Installation view.

As well as touching on the exploitative impact humans have on nature, Nkanga reflects on the central role ‘natural’ spaces and products play in influencing human culture. In Taste of a Stone, a large installation of rocks, pebbles and small succulents, she ostensibly provides a place for meditation, a kind of ‘Africanized’ zen garden. On one side of this installation, a tapestry is erected showing a botanical illustration of the kola nut plant – in Igbo culture in Nigeria sharing and chewing the kola nuts is a gesture of goodwill. As an incarnation of ‘nature’, it feels stultifyingly fake but the work nonetheless attempts to remind us of our place within natural parameters.

In Actor-Network Theory, and Nkanga’s artworks, we are confronted with a form of re-dress, that asks us to think about the world as a network rather than a hierarchy. The last stanza of the poem in her work We Could Be Allies mirrors this sentiment, it reads:

If I connect to you
If I am consumed by you
If I crumble with you
Then what do we call us?
What can we become?

The figures in Nkanga’s drawings, and in tapestries such as Double Plot, are mutilated either to become anonymous decapitated ambassadors for humanity, or severed limbs working in concert with machines. In Double Plot, arms form part of a mechanical apparatus that pulls a suturing needle across the fabric. The form of the needle looms large among the implements depicted in Nkanga’s work, indicating both creative and destructive potential. Freud wrote that ‘With every tool (man) is perfecting his own organs, […] or is removing the limits to their functioning.’ In these artworks, an alternative viewpoint is presented, in which the tool acts upon the body or the body is a part of the tool. The combination of body and prosthesis forms a larger functioning whole.

Otobong Nkanga, Double Plot, 2018 | Acts at the Crossroads, Zeitz MOCAA. photographer: Anel Wessels

Emptied Remains, a photograph that verges on life-size and dominates a full wall of the gallery shows the back of an informally-constructed home. The mismatched colours and haphazard add-ons indicate times when perhaps there was a marriage or a baby, or a windfall that made building-on a possibility. The abode – which (especially in the expensively constructed gallery space) looks at first to be scruffy and unaspirational, is in fact a catalogue of successes.

Things Have Fallen III, II & I are more ambivalent, showing respectively: “virgin” landscape, landscape with building and landscape with ruin. The subject matter is viewed through the long lens of the photographer as though in the distance and they have the sensibility of journalism or documentary. These works question the place of humans in the natural world. If humans are part of nature, is a landscape with humans in it still “pristine”? By presenting this leading question, Nkanga seems to think that it is, or at least that exploitation of nature is not essential to the existence of culture. Latour sees the relationship between nature and culture as crucially paradoxical, saying in Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, ‘The difficulty lies in the expression “relation to the world,” which presupposes two sorts of domains, that of nature and that of culture, domains that are at once distinct and impossible to separate completely.’

Otobang Nkanga’s contemplative and instructional works hang in peaceful stasis, the subject matter is serious but there is no emotional fallout. Couched in the visual language of scientific observation; maps, botanical drawings, flow charts, documentary photography etc, she reframes the world as networks and nodes. And when we begin to see the world as a truly connected network, we can begin to find answers to questions about the economic and psychic hangovers of Colonialism, the far-felt effects of ecological devastation and how to relate spiritually to the world when we have so changed our physical relationship to it.

With special thanks to Dr James Wink