Freedom. A notion that has had a complex history within South Africa’s political and cultural landscape. Can it be viewed as an end point which can be monumentalized and celebrated with ballot papers as evidence of this? What about the similarities and disparities between individual and collective imaginaries that revolve around what this notion means and how it plays out? The two-part project Looking After Freedom addresses some of these questions, while consciously adding more queries to the table.
Co-curated by artists and writers Nkule Mabaso and Raél Jero Salley, the exhibition Looking After Freedom is an extension of a larger project Decolonisation and the Scopic Regime. The exhibition centres thinking about multiple understandings of multiple freedoms. The larger project seeks to tease out locally specific responses to knowledge production and the multiple ways in which these are disseminated. The significance of this is revealed in how the exhibition’s curatorial process and the individual artworks speak to the different ways freedom has been thought about in the past and present, and the various versions of what it could look like in the future.
An interpretation of the title for exhibition inherently opens up the polysemy embedded in the word ‘freedom’. Firstly, thinking about ‘looking after’ as a form of care. Here ‘freedom’ is understood not as an endpoint which stands as something which can be looked back on as having been achieved in the past and continues to exist on its own. Rather, freedom is something which requires tending, nurturing. A notion which can be understood as requiring physical, emotional and political labour. “I think the artists that were involved are still caring for; they’re looking after the issues that are involved in freedom because in many ways people in South Africa are still struggling for freedoms,” Salley expresses.
Secondly, ‘looking after’ can be interpreted as a kind of looking beyond. In this sense ‘freedom’ is contextualized as a concept which has lives unfolding beyond its borders. This frames freedom as a point of departure that can looked at retrospectively in textbooks as well as through social circumstances.
Investigating the plurality of freedom brings to the fore political contestations, unveiling its potentiality. Ideal understanding of freedom(s) highlights the real lived experiences of freedom(s) and its opposites. People still continue to fight for their individual and collective imagined freedoms to come to fruition. Within this, Salley points out, comes the relationship between individual and collective understandings of freedom; trying to figure out if individual freedom fits into larger conceptualizations of what this looks like and how it can be achieved.
Dineo Seshee Bopape’s video work “untitled”, 2016 shows the artist bathed in a red light and over the course of the work chanting in a voice rising “Now I know I can. Now I know I can. In the past I didn’t, but when I saw my children mowed down in Soweto, in 1976, then I realized that in order to defend that… I would do exactly the same…” The statement echos the words from an interview that Winnie Madikizela Mandela gave to the Dutch television network, the date is not known but clearly it’s after the 1976 uprising. Dineo’s voice and the emotional pathos of the work becomes the sound to the exhibition as each work pulls you through recent histories and into continued and present struggles for personal and collective freedoms. Buhle Mbambo’s work “Black tax VS dreams”, 2016, depicts a ‘youth’ sitting on the street corner, appearing unencumbered, but also possibly taking respite from the heavy load of responsibility facing him. Kemang Wa Lehulere’s work “Dog sleeping, 2015” can be read as a critic of the education that creates subjecthood, dependencies, and subjectivities that condition the person coming out of education to have dependencies and not able to make affects or excise what has been learned beyond being a worker. South Africa’s systems fails young black youth continuously and the education system still is no exception both in the kind of the content taught and its inaccessibility, yet access to education equates to access to opportunities or at the least the potential to be able to identify these possibilities, and this curtails the possible extent of personal freedoms.
Broadly the concerns of the exhibition contact and expand between the personal and the political, the private and the public, through the nuanced interweaving of meta narratives with intimate accounts. Gabrielle Goliath’s “Personal Accounts”, 2013 sensitively deals with issues of domestic violence. The 5 screen video installation shows the faces of 5 women and the rhythm of their breathing and sighing and they recount a narrative we never hear. As they re-live personal traumas that we do not have privy to. The silences are profound, the violence articulated through each breath and sigh.
Mawande Ka Zenzile’s works with historic images that exist in the public realm and how they represent crimes with your perpetrators but lasting impact mired in conspiracy, and deals more with the notions of grand narratives of political freedoms. “CRIME SCENE”, 2016 draws from the images of Che Guevara lying in state in 1967. After being hunted by the CIA, Che was captured by the military in Bolivia on 8 October 1967, and executed the following day. His body was displayed to the press in the village of Vallegrande, where member of the press photographed the dead revolutionary and other posed with his body before allegedly being buried in secret. In the face of the student and the institutional brutality meted unto their bodies is this not the end that awaits all revolutionaries?
In the interview, referenced in Dineo’s work the interviewer provocatively asks Winnie “would you be prepared to take up a gun and kill someone in order to achieve what you would regards as your freedom?” The success of the exhibition is that all the works give enough space for the viewer to also bring to bear their own readings and understanding into the debates and positions of the artists as we try and grapple with our present and the possible futures.
With an exhibition interrogating freedom(s), the Michaelis Gallery at UCT was a relevant setting. The Rhodes Must Fall movement started in 2015 created a wave across the country, bursting open hidden transcripts about decolonial and intersectional practices to be included in a collective imagination with regards to space, learning, interaction and institutions. Artworks created over the past 10 years by contemporary South African artists created a timeline of imaginaries, pulled together by the lingering energy of South African students permeating from the university walls, requiring viewers to contextualize the works within contemporary struggles for freedom.
UK partners Dani Abulhawa and Sarah Spies worked together on a different aspect of the project which also falls under Decolonisation and the Scopic Regime. Spending their time based at a new gallery in Cape Town, A4 Arts Foundation, they spent their time embedding themselves within the artistic and social lives of the city. There method of working was to ask artists their thinking around the theme ‘Looking After Freedom’, both as artists and people living in the city. “We wrote notes during these conversations and afterwards we began processing the notes into fragmentary transcripts that we read, analysed and discussed together…Part of our processing of these conversations was to create a series of scores that we could use as the basis for a practical embodying of the ideas that were coming through.” They wrote four scores, each of which were integral to the project and offered much to think about and explore.
Their specific interest is in examining the margins, the ground politics, and ‘sideways’ practices. As performance artists they are interested in looking beyond what is typically understood as and considered worthy of acclaim as performance and art. Revealing one of the moments spent with a graffiti artist, they explained that, “To us, it is these kinds of – largely invisible – activities in communities and everyday spaces that most engage with the concept of Looking After Freedom.”
This project allowed for multiple ways of engaging with the theme ‘Looking After Freedom’ and from multiple creative forms. Through the scores created by Abulhawa and Spies as well as the exhibition curated by Mabaso and Salley, the past, present and future interpretations of freedoms were explored, offering a gateway to think about freedoms both ideas around care and everyday lived experiences.
The exhibition will travel across the country with the support of the National Arts Council of South Africa and opens at the Stellenbosch University Art Gallery on the 07th of September. As part of the lager project on Decolonisation and the Scopic Regime there will be a symposium at the A4 arts Foundation from the 24 – 26th of August.
‘This article forms part of content created for the British Council Connect ZA 2017 Programme. To find out more about the programme click here.’