Conceptual threads perforate the surface of fabric, textured by intimate histories negotiating a post-colonial experience. The Cape Town based artist, Simphiwe Ndzube, engages with a spectrum of mediums. These materials often include the appropriation of found objects – through which he stitches together a visual narrative, located in the experience of blackness in post-apartheid South Africa. “Articles of clothing and fabric become a skin, bound together by thread and combined with found objects, which both reveal and conceal forms.”
A dynamic tension between empathy and assault is constructed through the distortion of figures in Ndzube’s work. The underlying violence in the act of cutting, puncturing cloth and pulling threads is countered by assembling the amputated pieces together. He often draws from the, “context of disability and the physical violence of the genocides committed against black bodies both during and after the advent of European Imperialism”
“The act of stitching is a therapeutic and meditative process, a form of repair, but it also acknowledges the past experiences and wounds that persist and influence me as an artist.” Cultural exchange and an exploration of historical time is made manifest in the work. The presence of both monetary and symbolic capital is articulated through the diasporic movements of the textiles Ndzube acquires. “Africa has become a repository for the second hand clothing companies, in which an uneven exchange of capital gain takes place between the exporters and the locals who buy and sell these clothes.”
The cloth figures in his work often visually resemble notions of Black dandyism. “The dandy resists conformity to Western stereotypes through a complex subversion and reinterpretation of style and Western modes of dress. I have been looking at sartorial groups like the Swenkas, a group of black dandies that emerged during the grip of apartheid in the quasi-urban settlements of Johannesburg”
These suave ‘rebel-figures’ undermine projected expectations and limiting classifications through a reclamation of identity – embodying multiple representations within one form. “He is a warrior figure that bears both scars of cultural, social and political imposition, yet despite this, he stands in defiance. He refuses to conform to any social conditions that seek to render him powerless and to hate himself. He is self-defined.”
