Tag: decolonial

Faggotry (Embodied) // activating queer spaces with multidisciplinary artist Elijah Ndoumbé

Summing up everything that Elijah Ndoumbé encompasses is no easy task. The magnitude of their brilliance is enthralling and their approach is delicately interrogatory and essentially decolonial. Calling Elijah an artist is a fitting label but really Elijah is gifted & accountable to the need of expressing themselves and members of their community through various channels.

Born to a French father with Cameroonian roots, Elijah’s father was considered métis in the country where Elijah was born and initially racialised, Paris, France. The term métis suggests “racial impurity” due to being part European and part African, Africa being considered inferior. There was no conversation about Elijah’s father’s Blackness. The only time Elijah would indulge in their ancestry would be through the traditional meals their Cameroonian grandmother prepared. Elijah later moved to the West coast of America, where Elijah’s white mother is from.

PXSSY PALACE ST. GEORG [Munroe and Nadine] (Point n Shoot | Berlin, Germany | 2017) by Elijah Ndoumbé
Elijah’s ballet classes in suburban America subtly posed questions about their race and gender. Ballet class was filled with slender, white girls with perfectly arched feet and Elijah had a more prominent ass, darker skin and flat feet.

“The thing about ballet is that it is a form of dance that relies on a particular and biased body type…this experience of art was very fucking gendered and very racialised and I didn’t realise it at the time because of the context of the space that I was raised in…I don’t want to be the only weirdo in the room, I want to feel seen. When you feel desperately isolated and alone because you know something is different about you and there is shame attached to that, like throughout my childhood, there was shame attached to the desire I have and the ways in which it would show up in my life or the ways I would respond.”

U DON’T EVEN KNOW ME, captures of @zengaking & @ma_tayo (1) from larger series (120mm | Berlin, Germany | 2017) by Elijah Ndoumbé

Elijah’s becoming was profoundly jolted during their time at Stanford University where they were “severely politicised.” Studying “Power” and “History” within the context of their bachelors in African & African American Studies and Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies intensely informed Elijah about the dynamics of the violent histories that riddle their body, their family’s bodies, and the bodies of members of their community. Subsequently, this questioning of embodiment has nuanced Elijah’s work. “It’s actually quite a decolonial way of thinking – to burst out of the frameworks and to imagine what it looks like for us to build our own while simultaneously infiltrating the ones that exist…I’m a non-binary trans person, who has body dysphoria, also regardless of my complexion, I’m also Black, I’m a person of colour, I’m of African decent; I carry these things in the end. I carry a multitude of things and those things are going to show up in all spaces.”

Untitled [A Kween, Ascends] (120mm | Cape Town, South Africa | 2017) | Credits: Shot by Thandie Gula-Ndebele and Nazlee Arbee
Creative Direction and Styling by Elijah Ndoumbé, Nazlee Arbee, and Thandie Gula-Ndebele
Makeup by Thandie Gula-Ndebele
Assist by Tandee Mkize
Initially through the pen, Elijah struggled with this questioning in the form of written pieces that require prolonged simmering in love and care. Elijah was then captivated by expressing themselves through a camera lens and with inspiration and guidance from BBZ London based cultural consultant and video artist, Nadine Davis, Elijah began poetically capturing themselves and members of their community through photography and videography in various personal and global contexts.

Now based in Cape Town, South Africa, Elijah has captured the emotionally intense experiences of Trans womxn who experience a lot of casual violence, through their work with the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) in a video called SISTAAZHOOD: Conversations on Violence. There are also a couple of photoseries’ accessible on Elijah’s website. The prominence of visual work attributes to the attention paid to this creative outlet but there are infinite ways for Elijah to exist.

Danyele, a muse (120mm | Palo Alto, California, USA | 2017) by Elijah Ndoumbé

More recently, Elijah has had the privilege of “doing the work of making space to think”, this time has been an incubation period, in which Elijah has played with other mediums. For example humbly picking up a pen to doodle with some Miles Davis in the background and a “fuck it” mentality. Elijah’s exploration of themselves as an illustrator stems from their desire to be free from operating in fear, especially through a medium that will potentially fuel their other creative expressions. Furthermore, Elijah wishes to deconstruct the notion that only formal training like “art school” certifies one as an “artist” and the labelling of their creation’s as “art”.

Elijah has also been gravitating to the creative medium they first formally explored, dance. Complimentary to these embodied movements that resemble freedom and release are Elijah’s well versed music mixes, which could blare through the speakers of events like the Queer Salon. Created by Elijah and facilitated with a Black & Brown Queer DJ duo, Nodiggity, the Queer Salon makes space for Queer, Trans and non-binary Black, Brown and indigenous people of colour to be prioritised through art. While lamenting with me over experiences on dancefloors in Berlin and public restroom lines in Johannesburg, Elijah accentuated their urgency to continue building and facilitating safe and sustainable community spaces.

Elijah’s current phase of rest has revealed a beauty of the unknown to them and reinforced that despite daily negotiation of their textured identity, their artistry will always be an unyielding, irrefutable and indispensable embodiment of them and theirs.

Catherine, portrait of (120mm | Palo Alto, California, USA | 2017) by Elijah Ndoumbé

Express. (Point n Shoot | Cape Town, South Africa | 2017) by Elijah Ndoumbé

Habibiatch (Point n Shoot | Berlin, Germany | 2017) by Elijah Ndoumbé

Portrait of the Artist in Their Home Studio (120mm b&w | Cape Town, South Africa | 2018) by Thandie Gula-Ndebele

Eli Ndoumbé live at Yours Truly (Digital | Cape Town, South Africa | 2018) by Thandie Gula-Ndebele

19 February 2018
Simphiwe Ndzube: symbolic threads of reclaimed identity

Conceptual threads perforate the surface of fabric, textured by intimate histories negotiating a post-colonial experience. The Cape Town based artist, Simphiwe Ndzube, engages with a spectrum of mediums. These materials often include the appropriation of found objects – through which he stitches together a visual narrative, located in the experience of blackness in post-apartheid South Africa. “Articles of clothing and fabric become a skin, bound together by thread and combined with found objects, which both reveal and conceal forms.”

A dynamic tension between empathy and assault is constructed through the distortion of figures in Ndzube’s work. The underlying violence in the act of cutting, puncturing cloth and pulling threads is countered by assembling the amputated pieces together. He often draws from the, “context of disability and the physical violence of the genocides committed against black bodies both during and after the advent of European Imperialism”

“The act of stitching is a therapeutic and meditative process, a form of repair, but it also acknowledges the past experiences and wounds that persist and influence me as an artist.” Cultural exchange and an exploration of historical time is made manifest in the work. The presence of both monetary and symbolic capital is articulated through the diasporic movements of the textiles Ndzube acquires. “Africa has become a repository for the second hand clothing companies, in which an uneven exchange of capital gain takes place between the exporters and the locals who buy and sell these clothes.”

The cloth figures in his work often visually resemble notions of Black dandyism. “The dandy resists conformity to Western stereotypes through a complex subversion and reinterpretation of style and Western modes of dress. I have been looking at sartorial groups like the Swenkas, a group of black dandies that emerged during the grip of apartheid in the quasi-urban settlements of Johannesburg”

These suave ‘rebel-figures’ undermine projected expectations and limiting classifications through a reclamation of identity – embodying multiple representations within one form. “He is a warrior figure that bears both scars of cultural, social and political imposition, yet despite this, he stands in defiance. He refuses to conform to any social conditions that seek to render him powerless and to hate himself. He is self-defined.”

9 September 2016
Mbali Dhlamini and the decolonial etymology of colour

South Africa is constituted through a myriad of textures; it’s a kaleidoscopic interweaving of constantly adaptive and evolving languages and cultures, and communicative gestures within this context often do not lie prostrate to colonial dialects of restrictive definition. Complex physical and metaphysical engagements are constantly operating through forms of language that imposed ontologies could never even begin to find the words for. Mbali Dhlamini, artist and co-coordinator of Artists Anonymous, speaks to some of these intricate entanglements of representation within her practice, and has often considered African Independent Churches (AICs) as sites of dynamically contested meaning-making, or as a way to access wider concerns related to the decolonisation of contemporary-cultural identity. Drawing inspiration from her childhood curiosity of Sundays in Soweto, where incredible palettes of colour would mystically unfurl and radically alter her visual landscape, Dhlamini carefully listens to this often-unheard etymology as a transmission of alternative articulations that intercept dominant, dichotomising narratives or preconceived notions of monotheistic spiritually as being inherently westernised.

Like the imphepho sometimes burnt at her multimedia installations, colour can operate to heighten senses and perceptions and alter the parameters of understanding. The symbolic colours utilised within AIC garments, often delivered to church leaders through dreams, reflect uniquely African idioms which prompt a radical re-learning. While white may have been violently thrust upon the precolonial body as a way to capture and contain, the incomprehensible and incorporeal could never be served through such insipid specification. The vitality of progressive spiritual practice within South Africa is constantly reconstituting its own vernaculars against anaemic appropriation; while umbala may translate to ‘colour’ in English, in Zulu, the meaning is constantly shifting and so it cannot be arrested by dominating dialects. These invocations are often connected to fabric and clothing through ideas of ritual preparation and transformation, as well as questions of how what we wear (both physically and symbolically) comes to carry our form. Dhlamini feels that there are significant lessons here for issues of representation and identity and laments that these can be lost if everything is viewed through the registers of oppositional logic that embrace static constructs like ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’- the complexities of human existence require far more rigorous and unsettled narratives; something resonate with the twilight of ubomvu (red), which expands and transcends the dichotomy of ubumyama (darkness) and ukukhanya (lightness)…

All works below were taken from Mbali Dhlamini’s project titled: Non Promised Land

All works below were taken from Mbali Dhlamini’s project titled: Spirituality and Colour

28 July 2016
The subversive love of Nolan Oswald Dennis’ Furthermore

Nolan Oswald Dennis’ current exhibition, titled Furthermore, at the Goodman Gallery in Cape Town resists (neo)colonial logics of closure and destabilises the necrological dimensions of neo-imperial violence that continue to suffocate the vitality of life within the “always collapsing social fiction” of a ‘new’ South Africa. Instead of circumscribing what constitutes ‘reality’ through the exclusions of reductive tendencies, Furthermore seeks to open up a wide field of engagement where points of tension are explored through an acknowledgement of multiple epistemologies and perspectives.

The title of the show is an indication of these complexities in its significance as both a stereotypical trope of political jargon and as a word that continually expands the centre to bring into orbit the significance of that which is constructed as peripheral. What does it mean to notice the complexity of gestures involved in the recent removal of the statue of Rhodes, where it wasn’t simply unceremoniously toppled in a realisation of necessary decolonial vengeance but was carefully hoisted by the arm of a crane, holding preservation together with removal? What could these movements signify if seen in relation to the archaeological violence of the removal of other statues over a hundred years ago, which facilitated the incorporation and appropriation of the Zimbabwean Birds into Rhodes’ personal mythology, and moved toward stasis where the best ‘specimen’ remains in The Groote Schuur Manor House, the current home of South Africa’s president? How do bodies contain the traces of technologies of violence enacted in the bizarre melting-down of artefacts through the Ancient Ruins Company?

Another Country I to VI (image courtesy of Goodman Gallery)

Furthermore points to ways in which both the presence and the absence of memory can indicate how it is institutionalised or ideologically incorporated into (and appropriated for) nationalist conceptions and (neo)colonial forms of domination which seek to invalidate alternative imaginings and thus, the creation of alternative forms of life. The implications of memory are expanded through considerations of complicacy which circumvent particular ascriptions of identity and subjectivity and breathe against unequivocal integration into hegemonic forms of political sovereignty. In all of these foldings, Furthermore illuminates the ways in which acts always contains their own dissidence and seems to suggest that it is this difficulty that can actually enable engagement and understanding.

Dennis’ work carries the feeling of a contemporary articulation of Aimé Césaire’s resignation letter to Maurice Thorez, where Césaire stated that; “I am not burying myself in a narrow particularism… But neither do I want to lose myself in an emaciated universalism… My conception of the universal is… enriched by all that is particular” and that “it is life itself that decides.” In a vital embrace of becoming, Furthermore exhibits a transformative form of politics concerned with altering ontology, with irrupting integration into the bankruptcy of artificially discrete ideas.

The work of Dennis exploits inherent tensions in order to turn a system back on itself. The scent of this is carried in the way that Furthermore manipulates the aesthetic markers of the official and mimics the austere and processional tone of that which is sanctioned. The box is a central concern in the way that is can simultaneously obfuscate and draw attention-to. What constitutes a blanket-statement and how does this relate to a texture touching skin? History is captured in the impermanence of wax. There is a kind of urgent short-circuiting of algorithmic meaning played out in the patient intricacy of networks of lines. The aggressive pontification of the linearity of time is suspended through the co-presence of rocks and screens, unattributed texts from indiscernibly ‘different’ times which resonate together. There is a sense of the way in which graves are sometimes marked by deliberately damaged pots; of how new meanings can emerge and circulate.

Dark Places I & II (image courtesy of Goodman Gallery)

When I spoke to Dennis about Furthermore, he spoke about the symbolism involved in how gallery spaces attempt to present neutrality through a deliberate lack of self-memory, an active evisceration of all signs of what has come before; how the ‘art world’ is a huge industrial machine for moving money across borders and the ways in which everything else just functions to validate this; how an awareness of these limitations saw a manoeuvring of format for growth and explorations which can then perhaps enable other kinds of engagement; how the work can never be about the completed objects which are really just the excess of the work of trying to understand; how even intimate autobiographical aspects get captured and claimed, constantly repeated under the reductive and paradoxically distancing guise of ‘engagement’. All of these threads that weave together, all of the attendant things; the continuities in spite of the projected fragmentations.

Furthermore demands a new language and speaks to ways in which South Africans are no longer satisfied with the placating illusions of freedom, suspended in a series of active irresolutions. It reflects a radical praxis and offers an example of how some of the most thorough decolonial work is happening beyond the codified landscapes of engagement. Furthermore is part of a subversive love that will see South Africa invented anew and that risks singing madly with Sankara that we must dare to invent the future,

Furthermore…

28 April 2016