Tag: Mbali Dhlamini

  • WOZA MOYA – Exploring the Materiality of Spirituality in an Urban Landscape

    Moya is a phrase used to define a spirit, a soul or other presence. Woza Moya is an expression used to summon or call Moya to one’s presence.

    Corrugated paths connect piles of sand – remnants of earth peppered throughout the city. Collected and congregated, dimed lights cast shadows on the hallowed ground. Plastic silhouette suits are suspended beyond a transparent membrane as the summer rain trickles down, beyond the white cubic walls.

    palesa-motsomi-woza-moya

    Initiated by Marie Fricout and Mbali Dhlamini, Woza Moya is a creative conduit in which to explore manifestations of spirituality in Johannesburg. The exhibition emerged from the experimental project space – Goethe on Main in Maboneng – and engages with neighboring areas. The site-specific project locates itself within research as praxis and explores notions of spirituality in an urban space. “The project investigates what spirituality is in the city and how its inhabitants convey it through visuals, sound and performance. Woza Moya invites its audience to engage with experimental elements that mediate spirituality and usher transcendence.”

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    Surrounding Signs: A Symposium was the second event of the processed-based engagement. It investigated how spirituality manifests itself in the city through different aesthetics. Marie and Mbali’s exploration of the surrounding space had concluded that local stores in the area were in some ways akin to museums – some having survived the last eighty-six years. An institutional epitome of the cityscape. At the heart of their project lies the question, can spirituality be embodied? This challenging inquiry was at the crux of the conversation.

    The panelists included photographer, Simangele Kalisa and Emma Monama, a researcher at the African Centre for Migration and Society. Each of which shared their work in relation to the notion of the materiality/non-materiality of spirituality and the relationship between the two seemingly polarized constructs. Spirituality projected and imbued in the physical sphere.  Emma described them as being both complementary and contradictory, operating in a dialectical dynamic. She went on to say that spirituality is the, “pursuit of being” and appears in a spectrum of form and ephemeral reality. The project runs until the 20th of November – continuing with public programming events and an immersive research practice

    palesa-motsomi-woza-moya-2

  • Mbali Dhlamini and the decolonial etymology of colour

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

    Mbali Dhlamini installtion view

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

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

    Mbali-Dhlamini.-Bomma-v-Izambatho-Series.-94-x-205-cm.-2015_1340_c
    Mbali-Dhlamini.-Bomma-iii-Izambatho-Series.-94-x-205-cm.-2015_1340_c

    Mbali-Dhlamini.-Bomma-iv-Izambatho-Series.-94-x-205-cm.-2015-_1340_c

    Mbali-Dhlamini.-Bomma-ii-Izambatho-Series.-94-x-205-cm.-2015.-jpg_1340_c

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

    Mbali-Dhlamini.Amakholwa-Apostolic-Church.2015_1340_c Mbali-Dhlamini.-Seaparo-Sa-Moya--Se-Halalelang.2015_1340_c Mbali-Dhlamini.-Mopostola-O-motle.2015_1340_c Mbali-Dhlamini.-St-Jewel-Apostolic-Church.2015_1340_c