Bubblegum Club

Tag: mary sibande

  • Lightfarm // Creating a Culture of Collaboration in the Print Studio

    Autumnal light cascades through the intersecting branches of a small avenue of plane trees. The occasional hoot peppers the ambient buzzing soundscape of Braamfontein. Adjacent, buildings are covered in corrugated shadow. Tucked away –  just off Henri Street – a concrete and steel structure houses Lightfarm: a fine arts and photographic print studio.

    The space is filled with machines, occasionally making quirky beeps or sprouting reams of paper. Andreas Vlachakis and Amichai Tahor started the business in late 2007 – initially working with up-coming artists. A decade later, these artists have grown and so has Lightfarm.  The likes of Zanele Muholi, Ayana Jackson, Paul Shiakallis and Mary Sibande have worked with the studio from the outset.

    Ayana Jackson, ‘Wild as the Wind’, 2015

    The studio positions itself as a space of production. However, this is not limited to the technical element of printing. Andreas and Amichai resonate with the notion of the print studio embodying collaboration. This is the heart of their focus. Their partnership relies on this kind of dynamism and fluidity.

    Both Andreas and Amichai draw on different backgrounds. Andreas comes from a photographic tradition of photojournalism, having worked for many years at the Star. Whereas, Amichai comes from a fine arts background and focuses on interdisciplinary projects. They jest that if a client doesn’t like the one, they are bound to like the other. Through their combined experience they draw on an incredible history and wealth of knowledge – one that translates through a spectrum of projects.

    The democratisation of the camera – through the accessibility of digital photography and phone cameras – has revolutionised the space of photography and modes of archiving through documentation. Andreas and Amichai pivot their practice on the mastery of when the digital is manifest in physical and tangible space. They’re intrigued to see how this eruption in accessible images alters cultural production, especially in relation to the youth.

    Benjamin Skinner, ‘White 003’, 2015

     

    Mary Sibande, ‘The Admiration of the Purple Figure’, 2013

     

    Paul Shiakallis, ‘Vicky’, 2014

     

    Andile Buka

     

    Gary Stephens

  • Why Bubblegum Club is Not Just…Well, Bubblegum

    Bubblegum Club released their first cover story on the 26th of January 2016, and since then, have continued to announce new covers every two weeks. Their goal, at the end of January 2017, is to look back at twelve months of images and narratives, contextualise their position as a platform that offers an alternative aesthetic and commercial space. In looking back with an analytical and critical eye, they hope to identify and re-focus their goals, as well as correct their direction when necessary. Recognising who they are, what they do best, and what’s important to them as they reach into the future, Bubblegum Club will better able to better strategise for successful ventures in the coming years.

    Bubblegum Club as cultural artefact and platform of living practice

    Bubblegum Club is a platform for culture, fashion, music, and art in South Africa offers an alternative to that tired, old visual song. Its images and narratives balance on the nexus between fine art, photography, performance and urban consumer fetishes – everything from global brands like Adidas to niche clothing products– to offer better advertising and marketing possibilities for large corporations and young entrepreneurs alike. Bubblegum Club forms a bridge between “scenes” created between formal, institutional spaces who guard access and privilege, and innovative, interdisciplinary artists and cultural producers – those who cannot, and do not wish to frame their cultural production in accepted ways — who have less access to such formal space.

    That refreshing attitude – giving shout-outs to both “high” and “low” culture, art and commerce is apparent in the interviews featuring art-entrepreneurs like Russell Abrahams, founder and Creative Director of the illustration studio Yay Abe (Yay Abe – new vision for illustrative work and edgy performance artists like Dineo Seshee Bopape (Artist Dineo Seshee Bopape on Soil, Self and Sovereignty. The platform capitalises on the use of the body as design, and “design for the body” through recognising the ways in which urban youth fashion their physical bodies and clothing into “high” art. Here, the body replaces the white cube gallery and the history museum; material objects that are part of self-fashioning – including clothing, shoes, and jewellery, music, movement, choreography and styling – become part of what goes on the dynamic walls of skin and psyche.

    In effect, Bubblegum Club is a cultural intelligence agency – it is a cultural artefact of its own, and a platform for a living practice. It avoids clichés – the fluff and easily digestible consumer culture – celebrated without critique and self-awareness. Their focus is quality and innovative design over throwaway materials. It helps young creative (designers, musicians, artists, choreographers, stylists, thinkers) infiltrate formidable formal structures. In the absence of open avenues, they aim to create their own continent – a space to create, be, grow, share. It is a space in which cultural production is highlighted, but also critiqued – a place in which we can be insightful, and not be force-fed a trend that will leave us empty and regretful about our consumption after an hour.

    Challenging perceptions that limit self-making

    On this platform or stage, Bubblegum Club provides “actors” (or cultural producers) and audiences with the tools and avenues to explore in that journey; they offer innovative possibilities for changing and challenging social perceptions that limit our conceptions of self. They can also engage with local history and get a political education, whilst being entertained by dope visuals and easy-to-read articles and interviews. During the past twelve months, their cover pages on the “Features” section have been visually striking, provocative, and innovative. “Features” foregrounds urbanity and highlights the myriad avenues available to cosmopolitan youth through provocative self-fashioning. We see this in fashion articles like the feature covering the aesthetic of I.AM.ISIGO, a clothing design company that based between Nigeria, Ghana and France (I.AM.ISIGO – Transcontinental Thread). I.AM.ISIGO offers possibilities beyond the limited options of mega brands from the US that whitewash personal style; it also offer us the possibility of dreaming of the larger possibilities offered by other African design centres like Ghana.

    On the other end of the spectrum, we also get to question conventions. Lady Like – The fabrication of femininity, brings “attention to the various ways femininity is assigned particular attributes through the use of fabric, stitching, styling, photography and painting”; rather than offering us models in lacy underwear, we get to interrogate the ways in which we accept the constraints placed on women. In their interview with iconic artist Mary Sibande, we get to “blow up” the constraints that have been placed on the “black imagination” – and free ourselves, like her iconic sculpture of a domestic worker, Sophie, through daily acts of rebellion and dreaming.

    Context: problematic perceptions visual imaginary on Africa

    “Africa” remains a monolithic space of violence and poverty uncomplicated by global politics and military action because the images and narratives chosen by powerful news agencies and newspapers continue to speak to foundational myths that Europe (and white ex-colonists and plantation owners in America) manufactured about Africa. Even now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, images of Africa in news, fashion, popular narratives – especially those produced for consumption in the geopolitical West – continue a conversation with centuries-old work that constructed the African as somehow less human, less civilised, and (somewhat sexily) savage. Myths about “Africa” remain so powerful that contemporary visitors, fashion shoots and news journalists alike attempt to recreate the fantasy – ignoring, often, the complexity of modern realities – in order to reference those influential narratives that still have a claim to “truth” in our collective imaginary. Audiences and photographers themselves are often unaware of how these images and advertisements continue a troubling colonial legacy.

    The frequent-culprit list: everything from European destination wedding photography, aid workers’ and travel writers’ blogs, and even fine art photography from Africa by African-born artists. Often, their “Africa” shoot is accompanied by images of animals, vast vistas, and “colourful natives” – manufactured the foundational mythologies about African landscapes and African people that remain with us in the twenty-first century. One only needs to Google the words “Africa” and “fashion” to get an idea of what’s out there:

    Even though many of these striking photographs were taken in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the persona of the African is “stilled” – immobilised in time as something primordial, fashioned as something belonging to the past. They are still wearing clichéd “tribal garb”, practicing customs that are sometimes constructed as quaint, and at others, as harmful to women and children. On a fundamental level, they are present in the photographs to highlight the powerful personas of the white, superior European subjects – who have the luxury and ability to self-fashion themselves in modernity.

    Offering an alternative visual narrative

    Despite that overwhelming body of problematic images, hope is not lost. The technologies of photography are also a useful tool that helps us change and challenge tired, old views. We can train ourselves to identify the ways photography often repeats and reinforces colonial views of Africa and Africans. From there, we can consciously create an alternative image repertoire for this, and subsequent generations. Bubblegum Club gets that the present generation reads the world almost exclusively through images. In this age where images play a significant role in how we read the world, photographs that accompany branding narratives have even more influence. But we often read only as uncritical consumers; we read without critiquing the images, or the personal (and national) history that we bring into our reading of images. We rarely think about how our image “bank accounts”, and our processes are influenced by history and culture – history that aided violent, imperial ventures that depended on portraying “Africa” and “African” as somehow less than, Other, savage.

    That process of educating its public to be critical, analytical readers is an essential part of Bubblegum Club’s fabric. Branding and selling, together with playful re-educating and conscientising is the most significant aspect of the project, evident in Features such as Everything you need to know about Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival 2016, Eating as activism: Parusha Naidoo’s intersectional approach to our plates; Dillion S. Phiri – Social sculptor shaping African youth.

    That awareness means that within Bubblegum Club’s pages, there are often ironic winks at anthropology (that overarchingly influential field that helped constrain “African-ness” and “blackness” in particular within strict borders that aided colonial conquest and racialisation), sexual politics, “traditional” tropes of femininity and masculinity.  Instead, we are offered dynamic possibility, and subtly made aware of the influence of archival footage on the present. Their Features focus on identity formation with an acute awareness of the impact of history on the present, for clothing that plays with the multiplicity that is South Africa’s “heritage”, music that harkens back and looks forward, for collaborations that do not – above all, trap one within short-sighted borders of nation, race, gender, sexuality, and other markers of lazy identity politics.

    Their “interventions” are evident in features like Tackling the Tracksuit: Youth95’s New Capsule Collection; Multiplicity on the Dancefloor: nightclubs for the non-binary; Durban’s viral dance videos highlight the prescience of social media and the mobile phone in youth culture.

    Bubblegum Club’s strength is in that they operate in the in-between place of fine art and marketing, positioning themselves as provocateurs and providers of critical educations and our desire to fashion ourselves – to assemble and re-assemble our personas in order to signal desirability and power, to position ourselves as central within the flows of global modernity, and to affect and impact those flows, rather than simply react to what’s popular in America or Europe – using material and symbolic objects that speak to our own psychological needs.

    M. Neelika Jayawardane is Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York-Oswego, and an Honorary Research Associate at the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA), University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa). She was a senior editor and contributor to the online magazine, Africa is a Country, from 2010-2106. Her writing is featured in Transitions, Contemporary &,Al Jazeera English, Art South Africa, Contemporary Practices: Visual Art from the Middle East, and Research in African Literatures. She writes about and collaborates with visual artists.

     

     

     

  • The Black diaspora in context: Reflections on the Black Portraitures conference III

    The black body is a highly contested terrain that demands serious and complex examination into the lived experience of marginalized people. The Black Portraitures conference III, “a series of conversations about imagining the black body” was held from the 17th till the 19th of November 2016. This event was to be “a forum that [gave] artists, activists, and scholars from around the world an opportunity to share ideas from historical topics to current research on the 40th anniversary of Soweto”.

    Though it was initially meant to be held on the Wits university campus, due to the growing fears of student protests in Johannesburg, it was later moved to the Turbine hall the home of Anglo America. This new venue with its concrete walls and security at every corner would ensure that this conference would continue without any outside delay.

    The far-reaching influence of South African Artists like Ernest Cole and George Pemba would influence the decision to host the conference in Johannesburg, South Africa. Their works showed the harsh realities of black people under Apartheid and would give record to its struggle. It was also the music of Miriam Makeba and the images featured in Drum magazine that revealed this country as a rich source of a cultural production whose influence would make its way across the Atlantic.

    Today this influence continues through the works of Zanele Muholi. Her works on queer black bodies in the South African townships would constantly be referenced throughout the panel discussions that I attended. She would also contribute to the opening remarks as she asked the South African participants to sing their national Anthem, a motion that would be consumed with wide-eyed enjoyment of our mostly American colleagues.

    The speakers of the conference were drawn form academia, the arts, theatre, art history, journalism, literature and dance. These intellectuals would go on to provide a diverse analysis relating to black lives dealing with “the recent Rhodes must fall protests, #BlackLivesMatter, photography from post conflict zones, the poetry and politics of black hair and the 40th anniversary of the Soweto Uprising.” (http://suttonpr.com/assets/In-Context-2016-press-pack.pdf)

    black_portraiture_02

    The presence of US Ambassador Patrick Gaspard, armed with his suite clad body guards whispering into plastic ear pieces, reflected on the importance of this conferences:

    “It is of keen consequence that this conversation arrive in Johannesburg not only at a moment of historical reflection, but also at the a critical juncture when the masses of young Africans throughout the diaspora are no longer mere subjects in the running narrative on equal access to justice, but have become the provisional producers and curators of their own provocation”  (www.blackportraitures.info)

    Yet the discussions within the conferences panel would go to show the black diaspora were never just the subjects of such narratives to begin with. The conference would show the ways in which black bodies have been constantly excluded from the very mainstream knowledge production that would seek to establish them as inferior. What I would see is an examination into how those same bodies would seek alternative avenues in which to assert their identity and humanity in the midst of their systematic silencing. It is this very same process which continues today resulting in the emergence of new political movements that continue the struggle for the recognition of black lives.

    One such panel whose focus on Afrofuturism would examine how this literary and cultural aesthetic was being used in Detroit by artists and musicians to create new urban movements against gentrification and for basic amenities in mostly back communities.

    A well attended panel on “Universal Blackness: The diaspora Experience in the 21st century” would be presented by the Art Noir collective. Their discussion examined the deep challenges of black production within the arts. The very conference would be an expression of such challenges with the view that the conference was American organised and mostly funded. Although featuring many black American artists what resulted was the sidelining of the ideas and perspectives of local (South) African artists.  The struggle was one from those from the South to take back their own spaces of production but also be very conscious of their own complacency within the very artistic structures that would maintain the unequal position of black artists in the art world.

    One panel on Black power and protest went on to examine how “images have been used to protest ignorant notions of inferiority, while simultaneously combating apathy by attracting citizens to join movements.”  Zanele would herself present in this discussion examining how her work as a photojournalist documented the lives of those sidelined in society whilst also acting as reclamation of their existence through portraits of black queer bodies.

    black_portraiture_01

    With over 150 papers presented there was no shortage of good conversations and questions from the participants. The afternoon would also offer much entertainment and visual inspiration. For the opening night The Goodman gallery would host the conference opening with a festive reception and a celebration of its 50th anniversary in 2016.

    As part of celebration the Goodman would host the exhibition Africans in American which formed a part of their In Context 2016 series.  The series functioned in “tracing the criss-crossing lines, shared histories and points of departures in the field of African, African Diaspora and African American Art and Art history” by working with the Black Portraitures Conference in “addressing [the] gaps in art history and re-writing it from diverse perspectives” (http://suttonpr.com/assets/In-Context-2016-press-pack.pdf).

    The closing ceremony of the conference would be held at the Johannesburg art Gallery and feature some of South Africa’s leading figures in historical and current contemporary art. Some of the artists include Mary Sibande, Tracey Rose and Zanele Muholi. Also featured are the works of Dumile Feni and Gerard Sekoto as part of the historical presentation (https://friendsofjag.org/news-stories/2016/11/11/the-evidence-of-things-not-seen).

    Though the conference may be over you can still view the exhibition at the JAG and Goodman Galleries, that for any contemporary South African art enthusiast is a definite must see. Though the conference is over its impact can still be found in the ideas and challenges presented to its participants and speakers at the event.

    Yet one has to be in wonder of the logo for the In Context 2016 series.  It features image of two continents, North America feeding into an Africa coming from below.  This ironical presentation of the North to South dialogues seems to unintentionally reflect the deep power imbalance between these two continents. The conference aimed to find the commonalities between our lived experiences as a black diaspora. However, are we adequately able to engage with such ideas when global inequalities are so apparent, especially amongst its participants? Its privileged American (and even local) participants enter the space as Americans and the power that comes with such citizenship where the majority of African’s are being excluded from such opportunities.

    The question to ask is how the dialogue amongst its participants would have been different had those without the power and privilege of being able to enter such middle class spaces? The very spaces that claim to be engaging with the ideas surrounding black knowledge can inadvertently exclude the very voices that they claim to be engaging with. There can be no real discussion surrounding equality and justice when those most affected by the lack of such are excluded from these debates.

  • Subverting Historical Whiteness – The Evidence of Things Not Seen

    The free-standing building is isolated – a visual juxtaposition to the once-high-end and now dilapidated apartments around it. Surrounded by a colourful and bustling city center – it is a relic of a bygone era in Johannesburg.

    A façade of stone and traditional columns preceded by grand stairs elevate up from the local hustle and lead one into an architectural time-capsule. The sandstone cladding was originally sourced from Elands River. The presence of museums in the South African context relates directly to the Colonial project. The physical orientation of the original south facing building designed by a British Architect is implicit of a lack of understanding regarding the African environment – overlaying European norms and values at every turn.

    maswanganyi_johannes_1Maswanganyi Johannes

    However, on entering the historical building – it is difficult to restrain a sense of awe. Immersed in a space flooded with niggling nostalgia. From the Southern entrance one is absorbed into a white rectangular space with arching high ceilings, accompanied by floral embellishments. Several hardwood expansive doors with golden filigree open onto an internal courtyard. Above, gold flakes cascade off chandeliers. ‘The Phillips Gallery’ appears over a pair of curved hallways monumentalizing the institution’s former patrons in the glittering typeface of white capital.

    Only a little more than twenty years after gold was first struck on the Witwatersrand, the Johannesburg Art Gallery was established. Just over one hundred years on, the building and its immense collection still stands. However, in the ‘post’-apartheid, ‘post’-colonial context a radical shift has occurred in the spatial and visual representation within the museum walls. Its latest exhibition, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, opens its doors to the public on the 19th of November. It shares its title and conceptual articulation with a text by James Baldwin – in exploring the lived experience of people of colour. Pain that historically, has been systematically silenced by an overriding and enveloping whiteness.

    belinda_zangewa_1Belinda Zangewa

    The exhibition, curated by Musha Neluheni in collaboration with Tara Weber seeks to engage in social discourse surrounding notions of identity – manifested in the realms of queerness, feminism(s) and the Black experience. The show initially emerged as a “side-project” – mirroring as a platform for the Black Portraitures Conference – but grew into something far larger. One of the aims of the project was to actively engage the work of contemporary artists and allow their work to activate other historical works in the collection. These historical giants include the likes of Dumile Feni, Gerard Sekoto, David Koloane and Cyprian Shilakoe.

    Other artists featured in the show include: Mary Sibande, Belinda Zangewa, Nandipha Mntambo, Tracey Rose, Berni Searle, Zanele Muholi, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Reshma Chhiba, Johannes Phokela, Santu Mofokeng, Johannes Phokela, Mustafa Maluka, Portia Zvavahera, Moshekwa Langa, Nicholas Hlobo, Nandipha Mntambo, Donna Kukama, Gabrielle Goliath, Senzi Marasela, Turiya Magadlela, Kemang Wa Lehulere, Mohau Modisakeng, Sam Nhlengethwa, Ranjith Kally, Ernest Cole, Valerie Desmore, Ezrom Kgobokanyo Legae, Winston Churchill Saoli, Sydney Kumalo, Julian Motau, Helen Sebidi, Mohapi Leonard Tshela Matsoso, John Muafangejo, Azaria Mbatha, Daniel Sefudi Rakgoathe, Charles Nkosi, Johannes Maswanganyi and the FUBA Archive.

    kally_ranjith_3Kally_Ranjith

    The Evidence of Things Not Seen articulates a critical reformulation of the institutional space, one underpinned by an engagement with a Pan Africanist ideology. A position rarely embraced by public art institutions in South Africa. Tara Weber describes the exhibition as a kind of “homage to James Baldwin” noting that his treatment of identity politics is, “sensitive, but brutally honest”. The curatorial strategy has been made visually manifest in a similar vein – located in a space that seeks to subvert its own historical context.

    “There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.” – James Baldwin

    johannes_phokela_2     Johannes Phokela

  • Taking back control over the black imagination: In conversation with Mary Sibande

    It’s a special moment when one is given the opportunity to talk with their heroes. I first met Sophie during her exhibition as the main attraction in Mary Sibande’s solo exhibition ‘The Purple shall Govern’ in the Grahamstown National arts festival. Seeing Sophie, a life sized ebony skinned sculpture in Victorian dress, for the first time reminded me of one of my fond childhood memories of playing dress up. Just like Sophie I too would have a blue dress that would be shielded by a white apron. Like the little protagonist of ‘Alice in wonder land’ I wanted to be “pretty”, I wanted to be a lady and just like Sophie I would love to lather myself in layers of petticoats and puffy sleeves. Such, as I recall the memory, would act as a separation between me and my reality. The bigger the “poof” the closer to my own dreams. I would be able to situate myself fully submerged in my imagination.

    Yet it would be through Mary Sibande, the creator of this Sophie character that I would finally be able to engage with her motives for the character of Sophie. So often are we so emerged in our own idealizations that we forget that ideas made home within our minds have their own context from which they sprung. Our interview would be one of a debate about the character of Sophie and Mary’s process of delivering her work.

    Motlatsi Khosi (MK): You “blew up” in 2013 as the Standard Bank Young Artist Award winner (SBYAA) and your images were regularly in public space such as billboards in the Johannesburg CBD featuring your work and the tag line “the purple shall govern”.  And then you went silent. What have you been up to for the last 3 years?  What has your journey been like as an artist moving from working within the private home to public space sensation within the art world and receiving all the international and local recognition?

     Mary Sibande (MS): My prize as the Standard Bank Young Artist Award recipient in 2013 was the culmination of a few years of focused work. The acknowledgement of my work in this way presented the opportunity and challenge of finding other sources of inspiration. I have not had a solo exhibition since 2009, but the intensity has not subsided as I have responded to calls for my work to be shown internationally, mostly in group exhibitions, art fairs and residencies.

    Due to being a recipient of the award my work titled “the Purple Shall Govern” went on a national tour, gracing some of the leading museums in South Africa. Beginning of course at the Grahamstown National Festival, making stops at Iziko National Gallery in Cape Town, Oliewenhuis Museum in Bloemfontein and making its final stop at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg.

    I was invited to a residency in Michigan University at the Penny Stamps School of Arts. I was also given the opportunity to present a talk in Detroit. During my stay I was able to visit Toledo art museum in Ohio to witness the inauguration of my work at their Collectors dinner.  In the same year, I presented my work in a group exhibition titled ‘My Jo’Burg’ at La Maison Rouge in Paris. The show was an assemblage of work that presented the diverse range of work and modes of visual and cultural productions by South African artists. I was also invited to participate in the prestigious 12th Lyon Biennale in France. As well as Lagos Photo in Nigeria to exhibit photographic prints from my Sophie series.

    Mary Sibande studio for Bubblegum club

    MK: Your work has led you across continents and you have lead it forward.  It has evolved from a particular context and history yet you yourself are growing in both your skills and ideas.  The travels to unfamiliar places must have offered new contexts to influence your work. How did they influence your work? 

    As the show progressed I had to re-curate it according to space and context, this meant that elements of the show were added on and taken at different stages.   My visit to La Maison Rouge coincided with my residency at the Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne (MAC VAL Museum) also in Paris. This was an incredibly rich residency where I conceptualized and made work using the hosts of resources made available to me there. I worked with talented textile and Fashion Students to create the work. I worked with a seamstress who was able to translate my ideas even though our different languages would be an obstacle to our work. I was assigned a foundry that was able to make my fiberglass figure. I eventually constructed an installation piece in one of the spaces in the museum and was met with great approval. The museum also commissioned some of the previous body of works to be made into billboard posters, making the little town of Vitry-Sur-Seine (outside of Paris) into a giant ‘Sophie’ gallery.

    The body of work ‘The Purple Shall Govern’ has been seen in a few manifestations. The body of work seems to build its own momentum as it seems to attract the attention of curators from leading museums. One such invitation came from the Swedish sculpture park called ‘Wanas’. This was an exciting proposition for me as I was asked to create work that would be installed in a forest. The works durability had to be taken in consideration and so the installation was made entirely of fiberglass sculpture. It was here that my visual language would be thoroughly tested.

    I have also participated in the Winter Sculpture Show entitled ‘A Place in Time’ at Nirox in Johannesburg, responding to an annual call for artists at their exhibition space. The commission made it possible for me to create a four meter steel sculpture titled the “Mechanism”, the work was a larger than life presser foot and needle of a sewing machine. The work was paying homage to one of my greatest tools that I use to make my work.

    MK: Who is your character Sophie that features so prominently in your work? She has your face yet her image speaks to the South African story of woman, of black lives and a stolen collective humanity. 

    MS: Sophie is an ambiguous hybridized figure from my imagination. She is also supplemented by family histories or stories from my matriarchal lineage. To begin with, her naming is derived from the process of naming black women by their employers who considered their ‘given names’ too difficult to pronounce. This is one of many reasons for why I gave her that name.

    I considered that naming is equally a process of de-historicizing, removing, obliterating, and or defacing and individual. I regard this being a violent process. My Great Grandmother was named “Fanedi” at birth. This tongue twister of a name was removed from her birth certificate and she would then be referred to by the Christian name ‘Elsie’.

    The other source that Sophie stems from is the fiction that furnishes dreams or aspirations of this matriarchal lineage. I attempted to take the place of each woman and project what may be available to them as ways of escaping servitude. The fiction is informed by both my ideas and reflections given to me by these women.

    Sophie is the embodiment of the maid, the ubiquitous domesticated body described by W.E.B Du Bois in the book ‘The Souls of Black Folk’ who served as a warning within itself and the context that nourishes these personal/political but omnipresent battles. Sophie is me, my mother, my grandmother and great grandmother working to re-engineer our history.

    MK: I personally see two concepts in your Sophie character. The being of a woman in domestic garb reimagined in Victorian dress. Her agency, her dreams, a corporealized visualization in statuesque beauty. A black body one step closer to her mistress. Her story reminds me of Fanon’s Black skin white mask chapter ‘The Woman of Color and the White Man’ where for the character of Capecia her ascension into white society could be achieved through a white husband.  For the character of Sophie it is being attained through clothing as a means of getting closer to white society. Both characters could be unfairly judged as suffering from an inferiority complex but I would argue that both show the contradictions of agency in what it means to be a black woman under a colonial maze. 

    MS: Sophie’s aspirations do not lie in wanting to be anything (i.e. white woman) other than what she is. She is a black woman and a mother. Sophie’s desires are located in an elsewhere space or dream space, the material objects of her desires are illusive and can only remain as dream objects. Closing her eyes is the only way to concretize them. Perhaps her desires can be described as ‘envious’, an adjective which is committed to attaining freedom in response to a context wherein freedom is denied materially. The dresses hybridize a different identity by forging the blue fabric that usually makes workers overalls with the suggested form of a Victorian dress. With this combination an alternative maid’s uniform is created, and symbolically attempting to transcend beyond the dichotomy set up by the racial ideology of the colonial and apartheid gaze. The women in my family have not responded to describing themselves as inferior, but present to me the possibility of multiplicity. Sophie attempts to disempower that constructed dichotomy.

    MK: The second Sophie is woman overwhelmed by her once emancipatory garb. What was once Victorian luster depicted by the previous Sophie has transformed itself into malignant colonial nightmare? She is overwhelmed. Her face now overshadowed, her features fighting to make themselves seen or has she just give up to that fact that she will forever be locked in her own materiality. Does this work serve as a warning to choose our tools well lest they end up oppressing our own selves? 

    MS: With the body of work ‘The Purple shall Govern’, I push and strive towards an abstract space of emotions. I engage with contemporary fears and desires referencing as a starting point a historical event. The Purple shall govern was a slogan coined by the people in 1989 after they had been sprayed by the apartheid police, who laced their water cannons with purple dye to identify them after the teargas, gun smoke and dust had settled.  This opens up ideas that are less representational and more abstract. The work engages with anger, violent reactions and a response to the bewildering apartheid and colonial after taste.

    Mary_SIbande Bubblegum Club Interview

    MK: I am also seeing two major themes in your work, domestic work and Victorian aspirations. Two opposing worlds which for South Africa has a major significance especially in relation to what it means to be both female and situated within the (continued) Apartheid.  Within such a white supremacist space where Victorian dress still has major symbolism to those who would still revere a colonial past. The Victorian dress crudely representing white woman and the domestic dress crudely representing the black woman. In your works do you see these two words as cohabitating under the white supremacist masculine with Sophie being able to perform such heroisms as in your work depicting her on a life size horse or with arms flayed with staffing “putting a spell on the you”. Do you see the relationship as one that is toxic with one feeding on the other or is the story not as simple as “black and white”. 

    I find inspiration in women who work hard, juggling between being objects of servitude and being women. I find there is little room left to celebrate them and Sophie’s complexities become an aperture to contrast, contradict and challenge a mono-narrative. I recently listened to Chimanmanda Ngozi Adichie issue a warning which she called ‘the danger of the single story’, what I found valuable about this is that in navigating through their lives these women had agency and they expressed it outside their context of being exploited and used. They raised kids, had husbands and lived.

    MK: Do South Africans who engage with your work respond to it differently to your viewers abroad?  Has your work, instead, taken on a common understanding in how it has been received? One of the biggest contradictions can stem from the artists intention which can act in contradiction with how their audiences read their work. Are artist ethically responsible for work that speaks to their viewer, if so, does this mean that they have to carefully curate their work to suite their viewers? 

    MS: I find that the open-endedness of art allows viewers to engage with the work from any direction. The audience comes to the work with baggage and the combination of that visual and sensory experience can be fruitful. I do not try to fit the work to cater for an audience for I believe that the processes of making have their own integrity. The audiences have not determined what I make.

    I have been on various residencies and with each one I have found suitable shifts in my work; the contexts have nurtured experimentation which I have welcomed. What has been interesting is the universal image of the black female which tends to be based on stereotypes, but with these images there are slight shifts and difference. I made a work titled ‘a conversation with Madame C.J Walker’, wherein I found an overlap of her story with my mother’s. I had been on a residency in New York during Black History Month in the US.  Ms. Walker had found her wealth after slavery by making hair straightening cream. The concoction made her the first black female millionaire in the 1920’s. Although my mother is not a millionaire, she worked in a hair salon as a teenager which encouraged her to open up various small businesses when she left for Johannesburg. Their entrepreneurial ventures became the door to actualizing a freedom.

    There is a universal relating to the work as the institutions of apartheid, colonialism or slavery where centered on limiting the black female body in all the possible forms. The work often opens imaginative possibilities of how to think of this body.

    MK: My understanding of Sophie and what she represents would often be in conflict with Mary’s understandings but such, I ask the reader, should not be shied away from but rather fully engaged with. My discussion with Mary reflects the various interpretations on what it means to experience art, experience blackness as art and also the image of black in art.  Such difference represented the diversity in what it means to engage with black thought and those who inspire its ideas.

    Keep up to date with Mary’s work through her Instagram. You can also follow her on Facebook.

    Editorial image credits

    Photography: Brett Rubin

    Styling: Jamal Nxedlana

    Hair & Make up: Orli Meiri

    Image 1:

    Mary wears a gillet by Black Coffee, accessories from The Source and a Khanga head wrap.

    Image 2:

    Mary wears dress by Black Coffee, headpiece by Qba Nkosi, boots & accessories from The Source.