Bubblegum Club

Tag: Mohau Modisakeng

  • 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

  • Mohau Modisakeng- The Return of The Repressed

    The exploitation of the black body, and the counter efforts to resist, are the centre of gravity for  South African history. Everything else- colonialism, Apartheid, violence, war, brutal labour and toil, paranoia and fear revolve around this to various degrees. Such a trouble reality of embodiment is central to the work of Mohau Modisakeng, the winner of the 2016 Standard Bank Young Visual Artist award. Originally from Soweto, he initially studied sculpture under Jane Alexander at UCT. But his focus shifted from sculpting external bodies to documenting his own. And through a series of photographs, films and installations he has made profound imagery which draws upon ancient and contemporary scars.

    A great example is the 2012 photographic series Untitled. What strikes you first is the beauty of the images. They are expertly posed and styled, with plumes of mist and white doves giving a dream-like atmosphere. But the items included in the shots, like colonial style bowler hats and repeating rifles, betray a more brutal reality. History seeps like blood into all his work, with Endabeni being made at the site of the first official segregated settlement in South Africa, a literal birthplace of Apartheid urban planning.

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    His more recent work extends his critique beyond the borders of South Africa, with potent references to global forms of exploitation. An image called ‘ To Move Mountains’ is a stark close up of hands being soaked in crude oil. It subtly highlights how the substance we depend on is also the cause of war and environmental destruction, from the Niger Delta to the Middle East. My favourite image of his features a fancy dining room table covered in piles of filthy coal and scattered debris.  Historically it speaks to how European high culture was built on the backs of black slavery and the plundering of the Global South, and to how white supremacy was haunted by the fear of revolt and reprisal from the repressed. It also implies that our modern civilization is built on a fragile foundation of non-renewable resources.

    Modisakeng makes visual poetry from these contradictions. His work is like a documentary snatched out of nightmares.

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