Sometimes it pays to wait. Singer-songwriter Msaki and artist Francois Knoetze have been planning to collaborate for years, ever since their time studying Fine Art at Rhodes University. In particular, they wanted to make a video for ‘Dreams’, a beautifully haunting song of memory and regret. After a previous attempt didn’t work due to bad timing, they have finally unveiled their ambitious project. The video takes place on the streets of Yeoville, with Msaki’s subtly heartbreaking vocals paired with surreal images of performers in animal masks, creatures made from garbage and the singer floating down the road on a cardboard boat.
The striking film promotes her 2016 debut album Zaneliza: How the Water Moves. The release is a culmination of a long artistic journey for Msaki. She says that after years of running away from her true calling as a musician she confronted a personal situation where “everything fell away and all I had left was the music”. She played “in a brass heavy jazz band, an alt rock collective and alone in places that smelt like weed, unripe wokeness and confusion. In 2013 I recorded my first EP in a room with a boat hanging from the ceiling and called it Nal’ithemba.”
‘Dreams’ was one of her earliest works, initially inspired by the rawness of first heartbreak. But as the years have passed, it has taken on new layers of meaning. For Msaki the video shifted the song’s lyrics from the explicitly personal to broader questions of ” who can dream? who can follow their dreams? Whose dreams can become real?”.
Working with no budget, but vast creativity, Francois set out to realise images themed around ancient myths of the Great Flood. Shot over three days, the video incorporated interested passers-by into the shoot and features additional performances by Dennis Webster, Mthwakazi, Akhona Zenande Namba and Nomthawelanga Ndoyko. The result is a beautiful and evocative meeting of sound and image.
Kunsthal KAdE in the Netherlands will host a new exhibition titled Tell Freedom. 15 South African artists. The 15 artists featured engage with South Africa’s history of racial violence, racial capitalism, inequalities and injustice. However, there is a sense of hope for the future that comes across in their work; a realistic hope that comes from being deeply embedded in a layered South African socio-political context. Their work interrogates differing levels of social, political and economic injustices rooted in the colonial era and the period of apartheid. Through this contextualized engagement with differing levels grown from South Africa’s history, they attempt to understand their own position in the fluid and solidified aspects of the country’s social fabric. This also allows the artists to create an imaginary of South Africa’s future which is expressed through visual vernaculars.
‘Verraaier – Devil’s Peak’ 2017 by Francois Knoetze
Fine artist, culture consultant and curator Nkule Mabaso as well as art historian, writer and critic Manon Braat are the curators for this exhibition. The exhibition’s curatorial foundation is based on a specific question: is it possible to envisage a future based on principles of humanity and equality, rather than on exclusion and division? The objective for this exhibition and associated event is to contribute towards conversations and theoretical engagements on inequality to achieve a more inclusive society in South Africa and the Netherlands.
The official webpage of the Big Hole “experience” in Kimberley offers the story of the diamond rush from the winner’s perspective “the visitors centre tells the multi-faceted story of diamonds, of the people that sought them, the tools they used and the wealth they generated”. The wording politely focuses on the successes of colonialists like Cecil John Rhodes and Barney Banato, while avoiding the reality of the exploitation and systematic dispossession of black mineworkers.
With their new project, artists Francois Knoetze and Theogene Niwenshuti and musician Mkhululi Mabija (in collaboration with Sol Plaatjie University under Carina Truyts) set out to attack this historical airbrushing. Combining a series of visual and performance interventions, their aim was ” to disrupt odious colonial narratives that romanticize the town’s history of diamond extraction”.
In stark contrast, this project highlights the myriad of ways in which diamonds have cursed Kimberley. A short film made to document the work is book ended with a model of the city being decimated by volcanic lava pouring out of the Hole and over the surrounding buildings. In an Adam Curtis style montage, archive shots of the rich wearing diamonds are intercut with scenes of the harsh reality of mine life under Apartheid. Sound tracked, of course, by Diamonds are Forever. Knoetze has gained praise for his innovative mask work in his previous Cape Mongo series, which he continues here with witty scenes of a grotesque Cecil John Rhodes prowling the malls of modern Kimberley. The film skillfully includes the participation of a community members, with a great scene of teenagers visiting a casino and wisely concluding ” diamonds are money and make people mad”.
As South Africa faces an increasingly unstable future, the project is a great example of how socially engaged art can tackle the traumatic and unresolved past.
The immersive technology of virtual reality has world shaking implications. Something as small as a VR headset can destabilize the core categories of dream and flesh which make up consensual reality. With the new show Virtual Frontiers, artist Francois Knoetze is using VR to disrupt the historical categories which continue to infect contemporary South Africa with poverty and violence. Over six short films, his 360 camera maps the psychogeography of Grahamstown, and how the stark racial and social divisions in the town make it a microcosm of the country at large. The film’s wildly merge reenactments, archive footage and special effects to blur the past into the present. The follow up to his acclaimed Cape Mongo series, the new work will be premiered at this year’s National Arts festival.
Via email, Francois shared some of the themes which underpin his ambitious project
I’m fascinated by your psychogeography of Grahamstown, and the focus on the past bleeding into the present. Were there any specific historical events, or even things in your own experience, which inspired you to take this approach. And did Rhodes Must Fall also play a part for you?
Growing up during the Rainbow Era, I lapped up my fair share of the almost propaganda-like optimism that flavoured the public discourse of those years. I think my approach to making art is often informed by my distrust for neat, grand narratives. It forms part of a process of unlearning the inclination towards neat categories, binaries and conclusions.
It’s also an attempt at addressing the ahistorical nature of the Rainbow rhetoric, and how it managed to gloss over the burning question of reparations for 350 years of plundering. ‘94 was branded as an endpoint to colonialism and racism, and I think a lot of people just sort of bought it because it was convenient and colourful. The Marikana massacre showed that the government’s propensity towards militaristic death squad tactics against peacefully protesting black workers was not dissimilar to that of the Apartheid state. And movements such as Rhodes Must Fall opened my eyes to just how far South Africa still has to go in terms of restructuring institutions, syllabi, professions, and economics. We, the white minority, remain seemingly unperturbed or in denial about the dubious origins of our power and privilege, hiding behind security companies, high walls and #zumamustfalls, like the forts of yesteryear. Virtual Frontiers is in part an attempt to make sense of my position within this historical juncture by looking at the effects and systems which organise the way people experience the small, yet extremely fractured city of Grahamstown.
How do you feel the concept of the frontier impacts on post-colonial, contemporary South Africa?
I think post-coloniality is a term at odds with the lived experience of most South Africans, the structuring of its cities and its economy. Frontiers are barriers that separate, but like outer space they are also great unknown territories to be explored. I think post-coloniality is in many ways an unexplored frontier in South Africa. I think it is necessary to tear down the barriers that maintain the colonial ordering of people, commodities and spaces. I believe this would open up space for the emergence of a more inclusive society that embraces its Africanness, and doesn’t simply package a superficial version of it for tourist consumption.
What inspired the use of virtual reality, and do you feel that VR is something that is going to become more socially and politically significant in the near future?
I started experimenting with virtual reality whilst on residency in Dar es Salaam last year. For me, being able to place the viewer into immersive first-person scenarios raises fundamental questions around positionality and reconciling the giant rifts in the lived experiences of people in a place as divided as South Africa. It puts you, as the viewer, inside of the work, pushing beyond the screen so it has a raw, experiential power that pure film doesn’t. It’s the first medium that makes the leap from representation to experience. The social and political significance of an artistic medium that allows you to experience what you perceive as physical closeness is unprecedented.
The striking film promotes her 2016 debut album Zaneliza: How the Water Moves. The release is a culmination of a long artistic journey for Msaki. She says that after years of running away from her true calling as a musician she confronted a personal situation where “everything fell away and all I had left was the music”. She played “in a brass heavy jazz band, an alt rock collective and alone in places that smelt like weed, unripe wokeness and confusion. In 2013 I recorded my first EP in a room with a boat hanging from the ceiling and called it Nal’ithemba.”
‘Dreams’ was one of her earliest works, initially inspired by the rawness of first heartbreak. But as the years have passed, it has taken on new layers of meaning. For Msaki the video shifted the song’s lyrics from the explicitly personal to broader questions of ” who can dream? who can follow their dreams? Whose dreams can become real?”.
Working with no budget, but vast creativity, Francois set out to realise images themed around ancient myths of the Great Flood. Shot over three days, the video incorporated interested passers-by into the shoot and features additional performances by Dennis Webster, Mthwakazi, Akhona Zenande Namba and Nomthawelanga Ndoyko. The result is a beautiful and evocative meeting of sound and image.
