Tag: goodman gallery

Black Desire & Femme Rage: Goliath and Mohale’s Encounter at Goodman

This past Saturday, the Poetry Readings and Conversation brought together Gabrielle Goliath and Maneo Mohale in an event organised by the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg. Founded in 1966 during a time of unthinkable violence and segregation, seldom has the institution presented us with such profoundly embodied explorations of Black desire, sensuality, and queerness in art. The happening was thanks in part to a collaboration with the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class at the University of Johannesburg and its Global Blackness Summer School, whose theme this year is: For Wholeness. Black Being Well.

Selecting Maneo Mohale as the function’s facilitator was fitting. Not only did the poet and feminist writer have unstoppable chemistry with the guest of honour, but they were also incredibly qualified to take on such delicate subject matter. Mohale has contributed to various publications and served as a contributing editor at i-D Magazine. Their debut poetry collection, Everything is a Deathly Flower (2019), was shortlisted for the Ingrid Jonker Poetry Prize and long-listed twice for the Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Anthology Award.

The recipient of the 2019 Standard Bank Young Artist Award, Gabrielle Goliath’s work is featured in numerous public and private collections globally including Constellas Zurich, Tate Modern, and Iziko South African National Gallery. Her new body of work Beloved at Goodman Gallery, features drawings and prints. The exhibition, running from October 28 to November 24, 2023, features representations of radical Femme figures like Gabeba Baderoon, Caster Semenya, Sylvia Wynter, Yoko Ono, Sade, and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. While primarily recognised for her sound and performance art, the day was all about Goliath’s autographic practice.

Gabrielle Goliath and Maneo Mohale in conversation. Image captured by Thembeka Heidi Sincuba

Mohale began by inviting the audience to take three grounding breaths. They followed by sharing a poem, The Autobiography of Spring by queer Palestinian poet George Abraham, proceeding thereafter to introduce Goliath’s Beloved. Peering out the coffee table in front of the speakers, one could see Toni Morrison’s own Beloved (1970). This setting and sequence of events set a very specific tone for the day. From the get-go, it was clear that Goliath and Mohale were engaging at the intersection of Blackness, well-being, and creativity, with a soft emphasis on themes of sensuality, and queerness.

The way they spoke to each other was gentle and generous. When asked about her practice, Goliath replied, “I want to first speak about this notion of mark-making as a means of being close…” Echoing the mood in the room, Mohale praised this tactile, material, and more physically engaged process. Goliath continued, “… that really refuses the sort of sanctioned genius of the male artist, who works from a removed distance. And I refuse that. The physicality of the way in which I work and work on the floor. I work really close to these drawings. I relinquish the control of the hand. It’s not about the precious fidelity of the mark … it’s about relinquishing to the miraculous, what comes of that moment.”

Of course, it would be difficult to speak of love and intimacy without mentioning their antitheses. Goliath characterised her past work Elegy (2015), as a lament-driven work that addresses fatal acts of violence against women while avoiding the perpetuation of trauma. She said, “I did not want to return to the scene of subjection, I did not want to repeat the violence.”

At the nexus of art and violence, Mohale skillfully identified space for Femme rage, saying “ … in the wake of so much violence enacted upon my own body, it was really important for me to think it and hook it up to Empire … Not just these giant spectacular eruptions of violence, but legacies of violence.” Drawing inspiration from Glen Coulthard’s concept of “righteous rage,” Mohale invited us to view rage as a tool for Black Femme resistance.

Mohale prompted Goliath to reflect on the implications of portraying Winnie Madikizela-Mandela in this show. For a while, the pair lingered there and we saw something of a rupture in the way the two saw rage, with Mohale remarking, “I enjoy how my understanding of rage differs from you.” Goliath went on, “ … for me, what is really interesting with Madikizela-Mandela’s portrait specifically, is I find it very vulnerable. … it’s magisterial, but there’s a resignation … when I look at her.”

One of the seemingly many roots of the strong intellectual chemistry between Goliath and Mohale was the impact of Christina Sharpe on both of their work. Goliath’s encounter with Sharpe’s Monstrous Intimacies (2010) brought her towards an understanding of violence as both spectacular and insidious. Goliath insists: “We may need to bear our rage, and allow it to be transformed into the possibility of something else.”

In an audience-pleasing turn, Mohale asked Goliath about her portrayal of artist Desire Marea. As Mohale notes, “Desire being an initiated Sangoma is also not a footnote. … so much of their spiritual power is ancestral, is linked to bloodlines. … I think the sense of the sublime is also something that I chase in my own work, but … I’m seeing the clear instances and connections that are happening now between … contemporary queer artists.”

The intimate intellectual interaction between Goliath and Mohale prompts a collective reconsideration of the role of rage in desire and queerness in African artistic practices. It also did the long and thankless work of taking up space in an almost impervious institution. As we looked around the room and saw reflections of ourselves, both in the flesh and on the walls, we allowed ourselves to yearn for, perhaps even celebrate the dynamic and precarious possibilities within Black queer existence. Even amid this briefly beautiful moment of perceived reprieve, we were reminded of the violence that surrounds us as Mohale closed the discussion with a steady citation of Gabeba Baderoon’s War Triptych (2004).

13 November 2023
Is Algorithm the new Abstract?

Watching the contemporary art scene evolve is a little bit like watching a sports game as a complete philistine with no knowledge of the rules. You can’t really tell who the star player is, you’re definitely not sure where the ball is going to go, you have no conception of what is allowed or not allowed, and just when you think you’ve gotten the grips of it, something unexpected happens and it is all upended.

As with so many fields, technology has infiltrated the contemporary art scene. So just as you thought you were beginning to understand the Tracey Emin’s, the Ai Wei Wei’s, the Nicholas Hlobo’s, the Nandipha Mntambo’s, the art world threw you a curve-ball in the shape of the algorithm.

Now I would like to think I am no novice when it comes to art but ask me about coding or Java or (I can’t even think of another word to put here) then I am stumped. As long as I can open my emails and post instastories then I don’t need to know. It is like that time old saying – “If you love something, don’t find out how it is made.” But now, the foreign language of programming is seeping into my perfect little contemporary art comfort zone, and I might need to start learning the rules.

Ellsworth Kelly – Spectrum Colours arranged by chance III. 1951

So as every good writer and researcher in the 21^st century does, I went straight to Google (Ironically using its complex algorithms). Google told me that an algorithm was a “set of rules, or a process used in calculations or other problem-solving operations.” I mean if I’m honest, this didn’t help me much. As a society that are more attached to our devices than perhaps could ever have been predicted. Something that has always resonated with me was the video produced in 2015 of Otis Johnson, who had been released from prison after 44 years of incarceration. In this short interview with Al Jazeera, he gets off the subway at Times Square and is immediately bewildered by what he first thought was everyone talking to themselves but turned out to be what we all know to be FaceTime. It was the first moment where I sat and really considered how detached from reality we really are.

Each step on a Fitbit, each 4am tweet, each calorie counted, or song downloaded is being controlled by that terrifyingly foreign language of code. Plebs like myself see 0s and 1s, and lots of disruptive / and ? and * and [ ] – yet the next generation contemporary artist is seeing infinite possibilities.

Screenshot from selected/deleted/populated/isolated – cities in the global south, 2016 by Carly Whitaker

Take Laurie Frick, a New York based artist, who has used various data-trackers to create large-scale representations of ‘self.’ In 2012, using the app Moodjam, Frick tracked her emotions and moods over the course of several days and then created works like the one below as visual articulations of this data. At first glance we see work akin to the mid-century minimalists Sol LeWitt, or Ellsworth Kelly. Closer to home, Johannesburg’s Carly Whitaker’s Selected/Deleted/Populated/Isolated from 2016 uses collected, collated data to consider the representation of ‘other’ and uses Photoshop to disrupt and distort Google map images to create connections between cities in the global south. Each of these examples reflects on how digital data can lead to the abstraction or reorganisation of information.

And so, I ask, has the new artistic tech-evolution redefined the abstract?

Now that the digital age has permeated so much of our daily activity, how do we, as consumers of art, consider its permeation into the galleries? A large part of this new age of art seems to reflect on digital as disruptive. We see the background interfaces of the world wide web or distorted virtual realities – the relatively comfortable spaces of Google, Facebook and Instagram are discarded for the more uneasy abstract depths of the internet. Artists seem to be playing with the very ‘physicality of art’ – algorithms are used to create sketches that seem made of the human hand (See Jon McCormack’s Niche Constructions for example,or more fragmented abstract video works (like those of Casey Reas, or Diego Collado), or play with the developing technologies of virtual and augmented reality (See Blocked Content by the Russian collective Recycle Group or the work by Paul McCarthy and Christian Lemme.

While some of the Western world thinks we still ride elephants in South Africa, our digital artists are in their own way coming of age – spurred on by innovative spaces like the Centre for the Less Good Idea who had a Virtual Reality exhibition last year, and the annual Fak’ugesi festival that celebrates the rise of African digital innovation.

CUSS Group – New Horizons Installation Shot. 2016

Two years ago, I went to the New Horizons exhibition presented by the CUSS group at the Stevenson, and left feeling bewildered. As one expects when they see life-size pixelated dog statues, couches floating in Dali-esque, virtual waters and photoshopped couples superimposed into neon-blue digitally rendered nightclubs that look like the infamous Avastar (may it RIP). Were they considering the banality of the internet, the superficiality and excess of capitalist culture, the absurdity of digital programmes like photoshop and the constructed ‘realities’ they create, or perhaps they were just commenting on society’s gluttonous consumption of the ‘digital dream.’

Part of what the age of the algorithm means is that the digital is inescapable. Even Home Affairs uses computers these days. And as artists begin to consider the complexities of this omnipresent and opaque technology, we as viewers need to be prepared to confront a new abstract.

CUSS Group – New Horizons Installation Shot. 2016

Many contemporary South African artists are transcending the boundary of the screen or page and using 3D ‘collages’ to juxtapose the virtual with the corporeal. At the Post African Futures exhibition at the Goodman Gallery in 2015, Pamela Sunstrum and Thenjiwe Nkosi created a visual cacophony, Notes from the Ancients, and used installation to contrast the now all too familiar motherboard, with 3D printed masks mirrored on ‘traditional’ African artefacts, murals of mine-dump sand dunes, and defunct technology. This type of disruptive installation makes us constantly try to construct connections, to create some type of linear understanding. Frequently we are left dissatisfied, or with so many ideas spinning in our head we feel dizzy.

Tabita Rezaire’s Exotic Trade of 2017, also exhibited at the Goodman Gallery, considered the erasure of black womxn from the “dominant narrative of technological achievement” (Rezaire 2017) and how much of scientific advancement has capitalised from the ‘availability’ of the black body. The juxtaposition of images from African spirituality, the ‘glitchy’ virtual world, the jarring electric pink gynaecologist examination table, and the omnipotent, frequently ‘sexualised’ or ‘maternalised’ black womxn body are jarring reminders of the darker side of the digital arena. The motherboardby name reiterates the ‘mother earth’, maker of all – but disrupts the notion of the natural by the ubiquitous computer. We are confronted with a maze of imagery, that traverses the boundaries of the body, and technology itself.

As we begin to adjust to a new abstract, I ask – “where to from here?”

Tabita Rezaire – Sugar Walls Teardom, 2016 from Exotic Trade

20 March 2018
Gabrielle Goliath’s ELEGY // a deadly sonic experience

I am certain that it is impossible to shake off visual artist, Gabrielle Goliath’s, ELEGY performance. It has been weeks since I was part of the audience and I am still haunted by the memory.

The chatty room fell dead quiet as the seven operatic female singers dressed in all black walked in single file towards the almost cubic stage.

The first singer in line stepped onto the stage and began to sing the single note that was passed on to the next singer as she stepped off and the other stepped on.

The B natural note that was sustained throughout the hour-long performance resembled wailing.

As the performance taxingly progressed a singer would silently leave the line and stand to form a circle around the audience until only one singer remained.

Once the remaining singer joined the circle, they collectively exited the room.

Just like that we partook in the ritual of mourning that had been enacted by the seven black operatic singers.

Sobs now added to the soul-stirring silence.

The presence of the absent individual was hefty.The absent individual being a dead black girl, a dead black girl whose subjectivities were fundamentally violated and consigned her to a generic, all-encompassing victimhood.

Goliath’s ELEGY ceremoniously takes this form. The life of a South African woman, trans or non-binary, that was raped and killed is commemorated. At the performance that I attended at the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre in collaboration with the Goodman Gallery, we commemorated the life of Karabo Mokoena, a young black woman who was murdered by her former lover.

ELEGY like most of Goliath’s topics is loaded. Goliath grapples with the problematic of the representation of violence, pain, suffering, trauma and the narrative of others and of another. There is a profound delicateness in Goliath’s imaging, sounding and writing about these sensitive topics. Goliath strategically works around the violence to create the affective impact her audiences are left with.

Through ELEGY Goliath created a moment where loss became a site for community and empathetic cross-cultural and cross-national encounters. During the Q&A after the performance, the audience was evidently distressed because the performance did not provide a means of catharsis, which was deliberate. Goliath made us personalise a traumatised black body instead of routinely objectifying it. A distinct decolonial and intersectional space is created during ELEGY, which presents mourning as a social and productive work. ELEGY gives to those who have not been given a moment and plagues us with the irresolution of gender based violence.

4 January 2018
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.

25 October 2017
Kiluanji Kia Henda’s In the Days of a Dark Safari // Disrupting Colonial Narratives and the Nature of Necropolitics

Cloaked in swathes of cloth. Drenched in darkness. Morphous forms are interrupted only by protruding horns that peer from beneath the surface. Rendered scenes of botanical backgrounds create a space in which looking, operates as an act of violence and refusing to be seen, one of resistance.

Kiluanji Kia Henda’s solo exhibition at the Cape Town branch of Goodman Gallery, In the Days of a Dark Safari explores the homogenised imagery and damaging narratives of imagined-Africa, constructed during the colonial era by the European invader-oppressor. His work also navigates the complexities of performative voyeurism – as a mode of enacting systems of dehumanising violence onto the ‘other’.

“Since parallel lines only meet at infinity, so do colonialism and populism meet in neo-colonialism. Both forge artificial images of nature, the hiding place of the state’s violence” This statement by Henda and Lucas Parente in many ways resonates with Achille Mbembe’s text Necropolitics, “the shattering experience of otherness and…the politics of race is ultimately linked to the politics of death.”

Henda’s images critique the colonial trope of the ‘noble savagery’. Mbembe writes, “In the eyes of the conqueror, savage life is just another form of animal life, a horrifying experience, something alien beyond imagination or comprehension.” Henda’s artistic work around themes of identity, politics, and perceptions of post-colonialism and modernism in Africa constructs an alternative history that aims to disrupt the normalized grand-narrative.

In relation to this particular body of work Henda mentions, “the effort to create a Museum of Natural is a process similar to the creation of hostile narratives from the perspective of the foreigner who colonises by maintaining distance, consigning an entire continent to a Place of Darkness.” In this instance, the museum institutionalises and immortalises an archive of visual iconography under the guise of categorised truths.

The blind consumption of these often didactic presentations of ‘fact’, further reinforce problematic representations. Henda uses humour as a platform to undermine and erode entrenched visual tropes. His series, The Last Journey of the dictator Mussunda N’Zombo Before the Great Extinction is a semi-fictioned account, loosely based on former president Mobutu Sese Seko of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The series of images articulates the ‘end of dictatorship’, ultimately concluding in a kind of death.

“Politics is therefore death that lives a human life. Such, too, is the definition of absolute knowledge and sovereignty: risking the entirety of one’s life.” – Mbembe

6 October 2017
“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

1 September 2017
Blurring the lines between the public and the private, the global and the local

The cultural construction of the “public” and the sayable in turn creates zones of privatised, inadmissible memory and experience that operates as spaces of social amnesia and anaesthesia.

– Nadia Serematakis, in The Senses Still. 1994

Opening on the 25^th of May at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg and running until the 1^st of July 2017, is an exhibition by internationally renowned Moroccan artist, mounir fatmi, titled Fragmented Memory. Not only does the presence of artworks in South Africa by an artist based between Tangier and Paris, speak to the blurring of the global and the local, but fatmi’s own practice revolves around these issues, expanding into other issues such as the fragmentation of cultural memory after colonialism, the complexities of a hybrid identity, the sometimes oppressive weight of religion and language – which are all themes that have resounding parallels for South African artists and others all over the world.

Included in the show will be recent sculptures, reliefs, photographs and installations – including new work making its debut on the African continent. Goodman Gallery’s decision to show fatmi’s work in South Africa is to “facilitate a richer discourse on colonial histories in Africa and challenge the colonial construct of a Sub-Saharan Africa disconnected from its North African neighbours.” fatmi has been exhibited internationally, and to much critical acclaim, having most recently exhibited work at the 57^th Venice Biennale at the NSK State-in-Time Pavilion.

The Blind Man, 2015

Three objects form the basis of Fragmented Memory; a copy of the Koran, a photograph of a Moroccan King, and a calligraphic painting. These are the only cultural objects that mounir fatmi remembers from his childhood home in 1970s Tangier – all of which he was forbidden to touch or were positioned out of reach, but which vividly captured his imagination. fatmi takes these objects as a starting point for his work ‘to show how the few elements of culture I had in my childhood home have shaped my artistic research, my aesthetic choices and my entire career,’ he says. fatmi adds that ‘through these objects, I draw a direct relationship to language, to memory, and to history in this show, because, for me, these three elements depend on one another: without language there is no memory and with no memory there is no history.’

It is interesting to read this body of work in relation to the writings of anthropologist and author C. Nadia Seremetakis, who in her book The Senses Still (1994) highlights the importance of personal memory and narrative as constituting the sphere of potential alternative memory and temporality that combats the singular and encompassing narrative of modernism. Seremetakis says, “The split between public and private memory, the narrated and unnarrated, inadvertently reveals the extent to which everyday experience is organized around the reproduction of inattention, and therefore the extent to which a good deal of historical experience is relegated to forgetfulness.” In Fragmented Memory, mounir fatmi furthers uses his personal journey, in a sense mining his memories and digging past the forgetfulness, to comment on cultural memory and collective history – marking a rare autobiographical approach in his work. I am excited to see fatmi bring out these intimate memories into the public sphere and in turn challenge what we have regarded as defining moments within our own cultures and histories.

Roots 01 – Triptych, 2016

18 May 2017
Tabita Rezaire – Transforming the screen into a gateway for healing frequencies

Johannesburg-based digital artist, intersectional activist and Kemetic yoga teacher Tabita Rezaire is spreading love and inviting healing through her screen-based artistic practice. Having moved to Johannesburg a few years ago from Paris, she has been continuing to work within the Internet’s ecology to confront the legacies of colonialism and address our collective need for healing.

Tabita navigates her personal life and art embracing decoloniality – a theory and practice that involves a de-linking from the West and becoming one’s own centre. She encourages us to unlearn and reboot as she tries to connect with herself, people and life with love and gratitude, and with the intention to heal herself and others around her.

Her work is geared towards a spiritual technology and thinking about how we can become spiritual humans beings again. Through her “digital healing activism” she challenges our cis-het-patriarchal-racist-capitalist system through the use of the screen as her medium. Bringing an awareness to African cosmologies and the sacred power of the womb, she presents a diagnostic of the pain felt by Trans/Queer/Black/Brown/Femme beings and proposes a strategy through decolonial technologies which can allow us to reconnect with ourselves, each other, the earth and our ancestors to bring about holistic healing and an outpouring of love.

Tabita’s work transforms the screen into a gateway, inviting the viewer on a spiritual journey. The screen becomes an interface which allows access to therapeutic vibrations, healing frequencies and tools for working towards “soundness”.

The womb is a prominent symbol in her works. This is a push back against the demonizing, shaming and disposing of women’s bodies and femme energies which has polluted our world through patriarchal structures. Tracing back to times when femme-ness was celebrated, Tabita is invested in restoring our relationship with the womb and reviving an understanding of its sacred, love- and life-giving power. For her, addressing this disconnection from the womb offers a door through which we can learn to love ourselves.

Her first solo exhibition, Exotic Trade, will be taking place at Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg on the 8th of April. As a continuation of her digital decolonizing and connecting to the power that has come before her, this exhibition celebrates alternative ways of sharing and accessing information through what Tabita has called the “cosmos database”. As she has done with previous work, Tabita threads together ecology, digital technology and spiritual communicative practices to address the history and architecture of modern technology. She unearths hidden narratives, as in one of her works which discusses the origin of computing sciences being found in African divination. Her exhibition will also delve into ancestral communicative interfaces: the womb, sound, plants, ancestors and water as databases from which we can download information. She investigates water as a signal carrier from the internet to memories about the traumatic history of colonial routes, the disruption of oceanic ecologies, as well as the healing potential that water offers. The show includes six video arrangements and a series of five prints, a lightbox, and helper metal structures. She will include earthy materials such as copper and bismuth as a symbol of her desire to re-connect and celebrate with the earth.

Analyzing the healing potentiality of sound, Tabita is also working collaboratively with FAKA, Hlasko, and Chi (Robert Machiri) to create a “healing soundscape” for the show. Her exhibition space will be used for a Kemetic yoga class on the 13th of April, followed by a conversation with Milisuthando Bongela from the Mail & Guardian. This transference of the experience from the screen and prints on display to an embodiment through physical movement speaks to Tabita’s emphasis sharing ancient wisdom in all areas of our lives.

Special thanks to the Goodman Gallery, BDSM Dominatrix and Snake Bite Assist for supporting the shoot.

Shoot Credits

Photography by Paul Shiakallis

Styling by Jamal Nxedlana

Hair & Makeup by Orli Meiri

Bondage accessories by Mistress Kink & Master Grant (BDSM Dominatrix)

Snake handling by Arno Naude (Snake Bite Assist)

6 April 2017
Hlabelela or The show must go on: The Brother Moves On solo show at Goodman Gallery

“Make it look like a Spaza”, these were the words overheard as we waited to enter the gallery. The Goodman gallery on upper Jan Smuts drive would be the esteemed venue for the evenings show. The Brother Moves On (TBMO) made up by the members Siyabonga Mthembu, Zelizwe Mthembu, Ayanda Zalekile, Simphiwe Tshabalala and Mbalikayise Mthethwa, are a high energy jazz performance group. On this balmy night at the Goodman Gallery I would get to experience their first solo exhibition entitled Hlabelela. In Zulu, Hlabelela means to sing yet it would be in this exhibition that the brothers would not be doing their usual set. They would instead be selling us the ‘South African dream.’

The event would be set during South Africa’s bidding to host the 2010 soccer world cup. TBMO would toss out their usual brightly covered garb of tights and topless dress for somber grey suites and hard heeled oxford shoes. Even their usual collaborator, Kyle De Boer’s persona of metallic eyed and shadow winged character called The Black Diamond Butterfly, would be wearing his suite for the event. The boys would be the sharp tongued escort that would convince the FIFA delegates that South Africa is the number one choice. The part of the delegates would be stunningly played by the audience with their free wine as the perfect prop to get us all into character.

The brothers did a fine job in selling. Upon entry we would be greeted by gold covered pots. One of which would be filled with water like the copper bowls filled with holy water at the entrances of old Christian churches. TBMO were telling us that this gallery site was now a holly site and we would need to baptize ourselves and enter clean. Yet the next visual to greet us would be an arrow pointing our next direction with the words ‘Songs about death’ attached.

The exhibition would feature many corrugated structures spray painted in gold. By the entrance a non-functioning toilet with the warnings “Parental advisory, explicit lyrics” where one could take a photo of themselves whilst watching a video over a Brocken latrine. Ceiling lamps, bull skulls, cricket helmets with human skull and ear phones dangling from ceilings; all these artefacts painted in gold. White walls would feature constant messages of encouragement. “Say something stupid’, “Alice in Pondo land” and my favorite “I’m on lunch” acted as testaments to experiences of dealing with state bureaucratic procedures. The brothers were selling us a country that was living but was ‘not working’. They showed us a country with toilets that didn’t function, where heritage is ready for sale to the highest bidder. The bull, a treasured animal with cultural significance to many peoples on the continent, would be given at a special price even.

The exhibition would also feature videos of the boys as well as girl, the group’s manager Ghairunisa Galeta. The images were un-astounding to say the least and featured impromptu interviews and quirky conversations of the band on tour. This event would be a performance of the band performing themselves as well as a country on its knees performing to the highest bidder. Yet this would all make sense too during the Q and A afterword when one of the members stating “We brought Philip here to remind us of how stupid we act to an international audience’.

This exhibition would be an examination of what it means to perform as a black body to a white audience or a white capital owned space. The boys were doing their thing, making money, getting famous. A poster even featured a portrait of the boys written “we are finally on a Bill board”. The group would further comment to the audience “we sold ourselves in a time when it sells, realizing that we are pointing out what we are implicit in.”

The brothers would give the example of a previous winner to a prestigious art award, a Sangoma who was denied from slaughtering an animal as part of a ritual performance. Such acts show the contradictions of being black within white spaces as we are only able to act as such to the extent that a white audience deems acceptable. Yet it is those very white spaces, galleries and the paying art buyer who decide the value of one’s work and how far the young artist can go in his profession. The brother’s exhibition was in response to this as well as a perpetuation of it in their decision to host their exhibition at the Goodman.

An audience member and travel comrade of mine, Dr Nolwazi Mkhwanazi a Wits anthropology lecturer, would for me, ask the most pertinent question of the evening. “Knowing that this is an exhibition of poverty porn, what is the line between subversion and co-option?” The group would sharply respond and end the gallery event with the words “I don’t we are having a black majority conversation.” This is a question pertinent to what it means to deal with the inequality and injustice faced by the majority black South Africans. This exhibition may not have held the answers but it definitely provided a good start to where we should begin our investigations of what it means to take “the South African dream” seriously.

28 September 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