Bubblegum Club

Author: Hazel Kimani

  • Vincent Michéa // celebrating black consciousness with the use of photomontage and pop art

    The artist within Vincent Michéa emerged when he moved from Paris, France to Dakar, Senegal in 1986. Dakar, which has been called “the Paris of West Africa”, became heavily influenced by the Negritude movement after the nation obtained independence from France. Negritude was a black consciousness movement that aimed to counterbalance European colonial thinking by asserting pride in African cultural values. Paris became a meeting point for the African intellectuals that started the Negritude movement. The French educational system alienated them from their heritage so they united in the creation of a contemporary African identity through literature and politics. Senegal’s sovereignty was an organic moment for Negritude’s framework to permeate and heavily influence the physical and cultural architecture of the surrounds.

    Just once glimpse at Michéa’s works and it is obvious how deeply he was moved by the cultural rhythm that Paris and Dakar share. As Michéa said, “I paint the things that surround me, close to me, the within my sight: point of view in existential surroundings, consciously lived in but also consciously experienced.”

    After training as a graphic designer at the university of graphic arts and interior architecture (ESAG) in Paris, Michéa’s intent was to practice in Dakar. A year later and he had his first exhibition at the National Gallery of Senegal. Following this exhibition, Michéa assisted renowned graphic artist and photographer, Roman Cieślewicz for four years. Cieślewicz encouraged Michéa to pursue his career as a painter.

    Michéa’s works are riddled by Pop Art and feature the vibrant colours and hard edges of traditional West African textiles. He makes use of Ben-Day dots like Roy Lichtenstein in order to make his figures stand out from their surroundings. His works contain large areas of flat, unmoderated colour reminiscent of Ed Ruscha and early David Hockney and takes images of celebrities, like Andy Warhol.

    Michéa also makes use of photomontage. “I cut, I slick, I make incisions, I snip, I slash, I hack off, behead, I dismember…A table, scissors, some glue and images in shambles – Voila! The arsenal of a photomontage artist…Conceiving and manually producing photomontages with simple and common tools is a meaningful act that allows create sensitive images, charged with extreme tensions.”

    The glorification of Dakar’s past and the city’s contemporary allure is evident in all Michéa’s works and his closeness to the place, the people and the history may attribute to the effectiveness in which he captures the Senegalese. Despite his use of multimedia and his white gaze, Michéa manages to celebrate black consciousness and leave the vibrancy of blackness intact.

  • Kapwani Kiwanga // The Sun Never Sets

    Ever thought about how throughout history, nature has earnestly witnessed the human experience? Be it grand or minuscule, the motions of humanity have an ever-present spectator that accounts for our hegemonic ways. In her first solo exhibition on the continent, Kapwani Kiwanga delicately investigates this meeting of the organic, history and politics.

    Both disciplined in the social sciences and visual arts, Kiwanga’s works are interest driven and marry her training to create works that examine memories of historical moments and dissect different perspectives. Leading to her current exhibition, The Sun Never Sets, Kiwanga had been thinking about nature and how the organic witnesses our passage through the world.

    During her residency in Dakar, Senegal, she began examining what was on “the periphery or the untold…what was happening on the outside, the edge of the frame” during the celebrating or documenting of the birth of independent African nations after colonialism.  In her series, Flowers for Africa, Kiwanga looked at archival photos of these celebrations or negotiation tables and noted how the flowers present were documents or witnesses. Through collaboration with florists, Kiwanga recreated the flowers present at the independence of Libya, Namibia and the union of South Africa. The flowers access a moment of history that partially liberated fellow Africans. Through the duration of the exhibition, the flowers will gradually wilt and die, almost like the idea of an independent African state.

    The centrepiece of Kiwanga’s exhibition is a video installation drawn from the 20th century expression, “the sun never sets on the British empire” and speaks to our colonial heritage in a way I’ve never imagined. As Kiwanga continued investigating how the organic can be documentation as well, she began thinking of our relationship to nature and landscape, and how it is influenced by the colonial project. In an effort to unpack this, Kiwanga asked people around the world, who live in places that were part of the British Empire or who are still under British subjugation to film the sun setting behind a landscape. “I don’t think we always think about how our relationship to nature or romantic image of landscape in nature was constructed so that we could then, under the colonial project, appropriate resources, kick people off of land, mine land to take resources, cut down trees, etcetera, were all an economic goal for all of us. It’s the capitalist’s colonial project,” explained Kapwani. By viewing the sun setting in Canada, Ireland, Myanmar, Tanzania, India, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Africa, Kiwanga interrogates the romanticisation of the use of land and the appropriation of its resources in a colonial project.

    Kiwanga also looks at the agency of people under oppressive regimes through their use of unofficial footpaths in a series called Desire Paths. Using aerial photographs mostly in Cape Town during apartheid, Kiwanga observes how even during systems of discipline, surveillance and the militarisation of land, people still expressed their will by navigating themselves in a way that suited them. Kiwanga traced the alternative trails, which were initially documented on the terrain.

    In another series called, Subduction Studies, Kiwanga observes the space between Earths continents, specifically Africa and Europe. The speculation of Pangaea Ultima suggests a supercontinent occurring again, which will see Europe slipping underneath Africa. This theory inspired Kiwanga to take photographs at the History museum in Paris of rock specimens from the Northern coast of Africa and Spain. She then folded the photographs together to demonstrate a new form. Again, how nature accounts for geological movements but also speaks louder to our relationship as separate continents. It is interesting to observe the reception of migrants by Europeans and imagine a world, which might eventually be geographically connected.

    As Kiwanga talked me through each series that makes up her exhibition, the topic of colonialism reoccured. Colonialism as a project that was not strictly African but one that every continent is familiar with. The exhibition is driven by multiple observations Kiwanga has made about hegemonic moments and how the silent bystander, the organic, can account for our humanity. Kiwanga’s use of Anthropology causes her to produce works that voice perspectives that are causally overlooked. The attention she gives to the organic is fascinating and necessary.

    The Sun Never Sets will be exhibited until 18 November 2017 at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg.

     

  • Keyezua – articulating discomfort to liberate the new generation of African women

    Keyezua is a woman before she is an artist. A woman with womanly experiences in this manly world. An uncomfortable woman who finds solace through paintings, sculptures, poems, and film. A qualified woman with a degree from the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague, Netherlands. An African woman, who is changing the narrative of African woman, African people, African artists.

    Born in Luanda, Angola, Keyezua was cognisant of the expected social performance of femininity. As an occupant of a female body, Keyezua was tormented by the need to “get out the things that were born inside me.” She had to be audacious and speak to her African culture, her femaleness, her sexuality, her beauty, her religion, her artistry and rarely discussed African experiences.

    “It’s not only making art of beautiful quality, it means much more. It means to have an impact, it means change, or even saying ‘fuck you’ without any boundaries or fear. It’s about being fearless, it’s a nonstop job…”

    Image from ‘Nothing’

    However, Keyezua’s incessant mission is not considered a job. “Careers” belong to lawyers and doctors, not artists. Women can be lawyers and doctors but men are the real artists. Put simply, Keyezua’s journey has been difficult and she wearily advocates constantly for her space in society. Recently at the bank, she was told to just say that she is unemployed instead of claiming she is an artist. Her society thinks she does nothing. The pain of totally being disregarded by her people, when she is recognised in other parts of the continent and world, caused her to study body positions in a mixed media photo series titled NOTHING. Keyezua captured young black unemployed men who go the beach and do what looks like nothing as they wait for social change.

    In her latest work, FORTIA, Keyezua expresses pain of losing her father and receives long-awaited peace by laying to rest his suffering through illness and marginalisation. Part of Keyezua’s father’s battle with diabetes involved the amputation of both his legs. Even though she was absent, Keyezua knew how disabled people in Angola are treated. She imagined the depth of his isolation. Moreover, being unable to have “the funeral moment and sorrow, this is how I connected my father back to people that survive and continue their life in this metropolitan city.”

    Image from ‘Fortia’

    The symbolic masks used in FORTIA were Keyezua’s creation and were made by a group of six handicapable men. The absence of eyes from the masks represent how ableism causes most to turn a blind eye. The absence of a nose represents depression. The nose aids breathing and without it, living is difficult as is living with depression. The absence of a mouth and ears represents the silencing of the handicapable, their voices aren’t heard and nobody is trying to listen to them.

    Despite the sadness that conceived FORTIA, Keyezua interest was in creating powerful images that empowered a community that matters despite social ideals. Naturally, Keyezua used a female body in FORTIA as she usually does in most of her work. “Somehow, I worship the female body…” Keyezua explained. As her earthly vessel, the female body affects and enhances the experiences that Keyezua calls her own and relates to.

    “We are no longer the same as our mothers,” emphasised Keyezua, as she elaborated on how she challenges African and Western expectations on female bodies. In her mixed media series, Stone Orgasms, Keyezua spoke to the destruction caused by Female Genital Mutilation. In Afroeucentric Face On!, she speaks to the disillusion perpetuated by glossy magazines, soapies and social media.

    Image from ‘Stone Orgasms’

    Keyezua articulates her fierce convictions boldly and her fervent desire is to continue creating images that depict her discomfort in order to successively liberate the new generation of African women.

    For more of Keyezua’s work check out her website.

  • Nelisiwe Xaba’s lecture performance Bang Bang Wo

    “Bang bang what?”

    “‘Wo’ ‘Bang bang wo’. It means ‘help’ in Mandarin,” I explained as we searched desperately for parking in the streets of Maboneng. Statuesque and in all white, the sight of Nelisiwe Xaba at the door steadied our hurried pace before entering The Centre for the Less Good Idea. The room hushed when Xaba stepped onto the podium she shared with stacks of clear rectangular plastic bags containing various seeds and grains. With a playful candour, Xaba began constructing a coordinated vertical structure. The making of Xaba’s lecture performance was calculated and neatly built on local and global understandings of help and her interrogatory monologue was jam-packed with more than just seeds and grains.

    The lecture performance starts with a scene in Xaba’s childhood kitchen, where she laboured with her mother to prepare a seven colour Sunday lunch. Xaba then mentions how technological innovation has colonised kitchens and aided laziness. She places emphasise on how nobody is truly trying to get their hands dirty, suggestively like the South Africans who “elevate” unemployment by employing domestic workers.

    The 40 minute long performance meandered through the screams for help at the traffic lights, the traditional subservient role of Zulu women, Clicktivism, corruption, Black tax and abruptly ends during the exploration of the business side of help, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), which essentially thrive on aiding the remnants of colonial rule.

    As victims of the colonial era, Africans are helped, Africans are looking for help and it is this dependency that creates an inferiority complex. This power play essentially incapacitates the helped because how do you even begin to scrutinise the help? You are supposed to be grateful. Just take, be happy and wait until the next time someone decided to balance their social media feed with a post about how much they help.

    Xaba made maneuvering through this dense topic look easy. Her flow into each subject was enthralling, which is testament to her well written script. Being a celebrated dancer and choreographer, Xaba was challenged by constructing a piece that relied on well constructed sentences. Even though she attributed the making of this piece to “bullshitting” and “fucking around”, there is great complexity in how she locates the helper and the helped, and agitates their privilege or misfortune.

  • Modise Sekgothe // Performance poet, actor, playwright, vocalist, and instrumentalist

    Modise Sekgothe is a multifaceted Johannesburg-based artist with multiple titles. Performance poet, actor, playwright, vocalist, and instrumentalist. Each title is representative of a world that he has created through the mastering of his pen. The foundation of Modise’s worlds is writing, which is seemingly a need.

    The urgency to write began when the verbose poetic nature of Underground Hip-Hop “happened” to Modise in 2008. This genre of music is congested with information, which caused Modise to pick up a dictionary, a thesaurus, books and do extensive research in order to understand and exercise his own personal skills during cyphers. “I was just going at it…for a solid two years, every single day for at least an hour, I was doing that and it was bad, it was all bad, but it was a kind of chaffing away at the muscle because I had naturally found that by the time I was getting into the poetry space in UJ (University of Johannesburg) in 2010, I knew how to put words together, what to throw away and the muscle of writing was much, much stronger.”

    Photography by Nokuthula Mbatha

    In 2014, Modise’s poem To Die Before You Die, won the Perfect Poem at the Word n Sound Awards and the “pressure from the natural journey as a fickle human” the achievement was “a sort of shadow” afterwards. “There is a period when the weight of what you’ve done sort of interferes with what you’re able to do moving forward but if you are good for yourself, you can see the toxicity of that and you can wake up as quickly as you can.”

    Modise’s awakening to the abundance of creativity within him has been successful. Alongside multimedia projects like Metropolar and Mirror Me, he has also combined his poetry into a musical live context as Children of the Wind, with kindred musical creative.

    Most recently as Modise journeys towards an album, he created an EP, DIPOKO tsa DIPOKO. The title of the EP hauntingly uses the words ‘poems’ and ‘ghost’ as these chilling musical compositions and soul-stirring vocals bring life the ghosts of poems / poems of ghosts / poems of poems / ghosts of ghosts.

    You could find Modise and Itai sharing their gifts at the Curiosity Bagpackers in Maboneng every Sunday afternoon or find out more of Modies’s upcoming works and performances Twitter or Instagram.

  • “We Live in Silence” exhibition by Kudzanai Chiurai

    While assisting on set for a portion of the final instalment of Zimbabwean mixed media artist, Kudzanai Chiurai’s, three part series, I anticipated the announcement of the exhibition. After learning that it was titled “We Live in Silence”, I thought about the loud black imagery that I saw being created and wondered whose silence is being spoken to?

    The pulse of this body of work is from a line in Med Hondo’s 1967 film, Soleil Ô, “it’s crucial to be able to select individuals capable of speaking as we do, capable of thinking as we do, capable of retaining, of absorbing, yes absorbing words as we do and above all giving them the same meaning, and so there’ll soon be millions of white-washed blacks, white-washed and economically enslaved.”

    Kudzanai described the film as a nightmare. A nightmare that demonstrates how Africans are distressed by the conflict between the imagined promises of a postcolonial Africa and reality. The cruelest part is emphasised in the silence. “You have this internal conflict that you always try and quiet down. If you make it loud, if you start shouting it out, you’ll sound like you’re crazy, but you’re not crazy,” explained Kudzanai.

    We Live in Silence VIII

    Lamenting with him about this conflict, Kudzanai explained how he played with the passage of time. “It’s almost like making it for my sixteen year old self and showing him these images”. Essentially in his creation of these counter-memories Kudzanai speaks to this silence that has been torturing black souls in postcolonial Africa. “It’s just an alternative of beginning a history lesson. Like if I put those images in your history textbooks and said okay this is basically how our history had turned out, what would you think of your history? And by knowing that what would your decisions be later?”

    The completion of this three part series has taken years, starting with the middle, Revelations (2011), followed by the beginning, Genesis (2016), and concluding with We Live in Silence. Throughout the years, Kudzanai has been in the pursuit of creating an alternative option for himself. Alternative options that see black women as powerful opulent liberators. Alternative options that display a history that places black people in control of their future because of the firm grip they had over their past. Kudzanai has spoken with a magnificence that is coaxing us all from this silence.

    We Live in Silence will be exhibited in the Goodman Gallery Johannesburg from 31 August – 14 October. There will also be film screenings of this work at Constitutional Hill on 9 September.

    We Live in Silence IIII
    We Live in Silence II

  • Yuki Kobayashi // the New Gender Bending Strawberry

    Yuki Kobayashi is a Japanese visual and performance artist, who uses his male body to explore gender neutrality, question racial stereotypes and explore human relations.

    Initially, I questioned how apt a Japanese man, who grew up in a place with not much ethnic diversity could challenge social constructs, such as race and nationality. I wondered about Yuki’s cognisance of these global issues and his investment into them because after all, he has dedicated his artistic career to this mission.

    While sifting through various projects he has created, I was drawn to the New Gender Bending Strawberry (NGBS), a character indistinguishable as human and an icon Yuki wishes to be adopted as a guide and support to the world. The NGBS has a strawberry head and a silver body with all sexual identifiers such are concealed with silver masking tape.

    According to Yuki, the silver skin reminds him of “futuristic inhumanity and robotic material” and the strawberry is used as a metaphor, “it is ruddy like blood, juicy like an organ, and fragile like a heart”. Yuki transforms into the NGBS and incorporates this character into performance pieces to investigate “where we find the privilege of individuality…and where the fairness is”. The NGBS aims to reflect on the earthly condition and reveal the ironic situation to have both freedom and equality as well as how the world will conceive the future between the brightness of utopia and the apocalyptic death of humanity.

    During a performance piece, Yuki delivers a Speech (2013) as the NGBS, “my brain is red, my skin is silver, my sex is masking tape, you are picking strawberries but you will be picked up strawberries by someone in the future, please don’t forget about it.” Yuki defines this as a warning to us earthlings that generosity, sensitivity and responsibility are essential to our existence because social hierarchies “won’t stay like this forever”.

    Yuki was born in Japan, he then moved to Hawaii at 18 and later he attended the Royal College of Art and Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, both in London. He spent his younger days as a tennis player and he also used to work in a gay club in Tokyo. Yuki believes that all these experiences has contributed to the subject of his art and made him conscious of the global policing of the human body in regards to nationality, race, masculinity, sexuality, athleticism and the performance of gender.

    Yuki’s travels made him aware of how people are immediately categorised due to physicality. His interest in how most of us are seemingly navigating towards equality and freedom yet we are still attached to stereotypes became heightened. He feels responsible to reveal what we most unconsciously avoid so his creative pursuit is to be “a human junction to create a bridge to connect”.

    He is currently working on an exhibition for the Yokohama Paratriennale 2017 in which the NGBS will be collaborating with handicapable people. Moreover, you can view most of Yuki’s work on his website for a stimulating visual experience.

  • “We’re just a platform for kids in the hood”: Others Concept Space

    They occupy the same streets and have been immersed in the same culture so the delivery of Kagiso Mohlala, Mbuso ‘Moose’ Zulu and Siyanda Zakwe’s creative baby was strategic; they needed their concept to be different yet familiar.

    “We are street culture so this is just another way of expressing, and living. It was not a hard decision.”

    Their idea was first imagined as a creative lifestyle brand and in finding a base to “grow and nurture their young pretty baby”, built multipurpose home that cultivates creative pursuits is called Others Concept Space.

    Across from Dube station in Soweto, on 254 Mncube Drive, is a public phone container that has been transformed into a store, gallery and work area. Alongside the Others streetwear apparel for sale, there are pieces of furniture designed and made by the trio that decorate the store that is constructed from recyclable materials.

    The concept space opened in the 30th of April 2017 and so far they have hosted a couple of events, like an anti-drug campaign with international German live street artist, Fufu Punani and their June 16 “Revolution of the Culture”, which featured a sneaker exhibition amongst other creative entertainment.

    The trio plan on establishing their sneaker clinic, which will involve sneaker exchanges and cleaning. They also plan on providing creative business solutions as Others Media and Communications. Lastly,  they will grow their interior and fashion design.

    Essentially, Others is interested in providing a platform for all the kids in their community who have never had the opportunity to creatively exhale.

    For more of their creative instalments follow Others Concept Space on Instagram.

  • Langa Mavuso: seeping into the music industry with thick emotion

    Langa Mavuso: seeping into the music industry with thick emotion

    “Sometimes I sound like gravel and sometimes I sound like coffee and cream”, said the high priestess of Soul, Nina Simone.

    Like Miss Simone, Langa Mavuso describes his voice as possessing the capabilities of being both flawed, husky, and coarse as well as rich, sweet, and alluring.

    When I first pressed play, the smoothness of the guitar put me at great ease. Langa’s voice then boldly complemented the tempo set by the electric flex of the cords. There is a distinct masterfulness that Langa has over his voice. Every note is used to delicately sift through the song thick with emotion. Towards the end, I had been coaxed into singing along. I immediately listened to every other song, watched every documented live performance and experienced great satisfaction by the online feedback; I was not the only one with the knowledge of this gifted black boy.

    While Langa was singing along to Whitney Houston at the age of eight, Phumeza Mdabe muted Whitney so he could hear his voice. “I was like, ‘Shit, I’m hitting those notes’,” Langa exclaimed. After realising the magnitude of his gift, a significantly high pitched voice at the time, Langa kept it a secret because of juvenile heteronormative gender constraints that say girls should have high-pitched voices and boys the polar opposite. “I’m a boy who can sing like a girl, it felt embarrassing, especially at that time, when you’re in primary school…you just want to fit in with everyone.” Thanks be to the girl who heard Langa singing in the bathroom and reported back to their teacher, who insisted Langa share his voice with the entire class.

    Today Langa is a singer, songwriter and performer. He has appeared on television, featured on radio, had various live performances, released a noteworthy EP called Liminal Sketches and more recently a collaborative EP with Red Bull Studios in Cape Town called Home.

    However the route from childhood talent to a budding career was meandering. In high school, Langa studied contemporary music at the National School of the Arts (NSA) with his specialisation instruments being voice and piano. During his time at NSA, Langa’s interests branched out and he wanted to be a diplomat. So Politics, Economics and Mandarin were some of the subjects he studied at Rhodes University. After two months, Langa called begging his mother, who had been relieved that all musical aspirations had subsided, to transfer to study music at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Langa’s mother finally agreed but in his third year at UCT Langa suffered spiritually and mentally and came back home to Johannesburg. Here, Langa centred himself. He got a job as a writer and another as a content producer and social media manager. Then the faint whisper of his purpose began again and he responded accordingly. Langa left his job, finished music he had been writing for years and pursued his calling.

    “I don’t think the music ever stopped in every instance where I was trying to run away from it. It was there but I was just trying not to make it the light of my life, y’know? But eventually, it was just like, you know this is the one thing you can do without anyone having to wake you up in the morning, without a pay cheque, you’ll do it, so that’s how it just happened, it was a natural progression,” Langa explained.

    Nevertheless, the formal training that Langa went through enhanced how he brilliantly articulates and translates his thoughts, ideas and emotions into a three minute track. Langa writes about love in its different phases. In his first EP, he explored loss and heartbreak and in the other, Langa sings about infidelity.

    “I’ve never had someone come up to me and say, ‘Hey, I don’t like your music’”. Based on observation and personal encounters, Langa believes that his music resonates with different generations. The manner in which Langa utilises his voice and pairs it with either jazzy rhythms or an electronic beat is skilful and exciting. However, Langa is certain that he does not comfortably fit into the South African music industry.

    “I think I don’t fit in 100% but people appreciate the talent and they see something in it so there is an embrace of some sort but there are still people who are sort of, not reluctant, but like not too sure. It’s like the sound is a little too international. It sounds like very British Soul but then there is this African guitar and then there is this and that, which sort of brings you back to home and then you’re singing in Zulu, under this crazy electro beat by Spoek (Mathambo), like what is this?”

    Yrsa Daley-Ward wrote, “If you have to fold to fit in, it ain’t right.” Subsequently, Langa has found that a space is opening up for him to be incorporated with help from mainstream music producers, like Black Coffee and Tweezy. “I’m not trying to fit in. I’m not interested in fitting in. I think we’re living in a creative time where we can be whatever we want to be and sort of teach people to assimilate into the ideas that we have.”

    Langa has a cognisance of the power of human emotion. It is something that we innately share and probably why his music has a familiar comforting sweetness and light.

    After the collaborative projects on the way and multiple singles Langa is working on, he hopes to be a household name when he releases his debut album a year from now. For now stay on Langa’s Soundcloud page.

  • The GLO’WUP: the intricacies of being a transgender woman in South Africa

    The harmonies of SZA’s ‘Love Galore’ usher us into the life of Glow Mamiii. The close frame of each video enhance the intimate space that Glow is inviting us into and in every episode we experience the intricacies of the life of a transgender woman in South Africa.

    Glow believes that she is the first to document her transition on YouTube in South Africa and she is fearlessly pioneering with a vulnerability that seems effortless . “I guess I had to desensitise myself from myself and become part of the bigger picture…The reason I am doing this is way beyond opening up. It is about so many people that have been discarded, people that have been totally disposable and told that their voices don’t matter, when their voices actually matter,” explained Glow.

    There is a rawness to Glow’s videos that personalise her reality. “I just want to entertain people and along the way I actually want to invite them into our life, like marginalised people who are seen as ‘other’, who are caricatured and really dehumanised. We’re always seen through this lens that strips us of our very basic human needs, like respect and integrity and so much is always stripped away from us because of who we are, because of the very fact that we identify as a certain gender. People always decontextualise it and make it into this whole fantasy world that is just so grotesque. So I just want to invite people into our lives and entertain them and show them that we are actually super dope people.”

    Often, Glow is in her apartment, in a fashionable ensemble, face beat, on her couch sharing stories of her becoming. In videos like How I learned I am transgender and Am I on hormones yet? , she shares experiences that resonate to the lives of transgender people. In videos like These bitches want Nikes and Chit Chat, she shares about her personal life in Johannesburg.

    “The reason I share is to get people to know us, like to know trans people instead of just having this idea of what a trans person is…a trans person is just like any other person; we have interests, we have pet peeves, we live normal lives, either than the fact that we’re transgender….also being able to also teach other people how to destigmatise identities that have been completely dehumanised that gives me pleasure. it’s like rebuilding a broken home,” said Glow.

    Check out Glow Mamiii’s YouTube page, especially on Mondays for new content. You can keep up with her on Instagram or Twitter.

     

  • Serge Alain Nitegeka’s Ode to Black

    With wood, cement and light blue, burnt orange and bright yellow paint Serge Alain Nitegeka subtly pays Ode to Black at the Stevenson gallery in Johannesburg.

    Ode to Black speaks to the subconscious way marginalised people live, specifically asylum seekers and refugees, which is a theme that runs through his works.

    During his walkabout on Thursday the 25th of May, Nitegeka explained how he enjoys disrupting space, much like blackness. Moreover, he explored how accessing spaces tends to be specifically difficult for black migrants. So the gallery space itself is slightly transformed for us to experience this struggle.

    Nitegeka delicately contextualised the space so accessing his work is art itself. For example, the “normal” entrance into the space is disrupted by black wooden planks and instead, we are forced to go through an opening in the wall that is shaped like the quarter of a circle, which almost looks like a mouse hole shaped.

    The use of wood is prominent throughout the exhibition. Nitegeka told us how his relationship with wood started with the use of wooden second hand shipping crates. Those crates had a history of movement, which easily made a connection with the crossing of black lives between boarders. Moreover, Nitegeka considers wood a malleable material, a flexible material, with freedom because the shape of wood can be altered, just as a migrant’s identity is forcibly changed. Even though this transformation of wood and identity may be brutal, the end result is a beautiful sculpture and a testament to the resilience of the migrant experience.

    Nitegeka’s Ode to Black reads as follows:

    Black is the colour of mourning and melancholy. Black epitomises stealth; it is central to clandestine ventures and cool lonesomeness. Black is the colour of executive cars, gadgets, accessories and clothing. Eternally beautiful, Black is the colour of the universe, the infinite deep dark unknown abyss. Black is a wormhole, mysterious and ever-receding, absorbing everything around it and revealing nothing. Black is all colours mixed together, perhaps the sum of the visible. Black is the only colour without light, though full and empty.

    Black is a colour reserved unto itself. It is comfortable in its own nature, unruffled and confident. It tries very hard to stay anonymous but inquiring eyes are drawn to it; spectators cannot resist it. It is not popular. It reveals little because it is neither warm nor cold. It is an enigmatic pigment.

    The colour black presents itself ambiguously in meaning, like the abstract forms in my practice. Ode to Black explores the multitude of meanings that the colour black invites in my work thus far, in paintings, sculptures and installations.

    You can experience ode at the Stevenson Gallery in Johannesburg until the 30th of June.

     

  • Ncumisa ‘Mimi’ Duma – creative expression through hair

    At the top of a list of powerful black anthems is probably Solange’s ‘Don’t touch my hair’, a song that captures the sacredness of a black girl’s hair. In the opening verse Solange expresses that our hair is a manifestation of our feelings, our soul, our rhythm, a crown, which cannot be touched. These are sentiments that Ncumisa ‘Mimi’ Duma, a freelance natural hair artist based in Johannesburg, deeply understands.

    “I touch more than hair,” explained Mimi. Years of styling hair have revealed to Mimi the power she has over a person’s image, mood, perception and reception. However, Mimi considers it more than just a skill that she developed and vigorously studied, it is her “calling”.

    It was during a theatrical production in Germany that Mimi finally found a path, Carlton Hair International, that would continue allowing her to express her creativity through hair. After three years at the Caucasian hair based institution, Mimi took to the salons of inner city Johannesburg even though she had been told that “there is more money in Caucasian hair than there is in Ethnic hair”. But Mimi was set in changing that and transforming the Ethnic hair industry.

    During her years of study, Mimi was taught about customer relations, hair to product knowledge, how to effectively find out about the history of someone’s hair and how to handle the hair accordingly. Her mission was to master the intimate relationship that a hair stylist and their client have, and transfer this knowledge into Ethnic hair salon spaces, where the customer’s natural hair is actually being cared for and not simply be chemically processed.

    Mimi is always in search for spaces that she can celebrate natural Ethnic hair through her creative hair styling. She has been presented with opportunities to manage natural Ethnic hair salons, style for productions, photoshoots (like Tarryn Alberts’ Bubblegum Club cover shoot), fashion shows and performances. Currently based in a salon in Maboneng, Mimi has the freedom to freelance and make house calls.

    There is a masterful intricacy in each one of Mimi’s works of art. She is currently experimenting with wool, protective styles with a modern African twist and plotting how she can build an army of natural hairstylists that will guarantee that when a black girl’s hair is touched, it will be touched with the reverence it deserves.

    For more on Mimi’s masterpieces follow her on Instagram.