9 More Weeks

Dada Khanyisa Zander Blom Bronwyn Katz Kemang Wa Lehulere Guy Tillim Mame-Diarra Niang Claudette Schreuders Simphiwe Ndzube Portia Zvavahera in conversation with Sinazo Chiya

9 WEEKS

Essays and interviews by Sinazo Chiya

9 WEEKS

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Dada Khanyisa Zander Blom Bronwyn Katz Kemang Wa Lehulere Guy Tillim Mame-Diarra Niang Claudette Schreuders Simphiwe Ndzube Portia Zvavahera

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Biographies 141

Introduction Sinazo Chiya

9 Weeks, the first volume in this series of conversations, ‘map[ped] a journey through an artistic landscape, at a particular moment in time’. This edition, which can accurately be called ‘several more than 9 weeks’, functions to reflect rather than map. The following texts snapshot the elasticity of artists’ perspectives and practices in a peculiar time.

These 9 More Weeks pass over an era of extreme public-mindedness. Over the construction of this text South Africa gained a new president and Zimbabwe lost a dictator – the enthusiasm of both nations cooling into dread; Vicki Momberg became the first person sentenced to prison for a public display of racism; powerful and venerated men were ousted from their positions in the floodgate of reports on sexual abuses; the term ‘Day Zero’ loomed large in the public imagination, fronting the Time magazine website and inspiring panicked purchases of buckets, then disappearing into obscurity; citizens were mobilised to contribute to an informal 5

Introduction

referendum regarding land restitution via WhatsApp; institutions were asked to account for their benefactors’ alleged roles in drug epidemics and oppressive regimes. In a recent edition of a local art zine, a cartoon depicts dejected middle-aged white men with the punchline, ‘It seems unfair that we are no longer relevant’. The social landscape is cratered with renegotiations of how bodies exist in space – and the body of the artist is no different.

Some conversations take place in studios and homes, others occur via Skype, Facebook video and email. The politicised social undercurrent manifests as artists echo each other in statements around the political potential of abstraction; on whether or not the question of beauty is still worth asking and if artists have any obligations towards the time and place in which they find themselves.

Authorship, material and meaning prove sites of contention. Kemang Wa Lehulere remarks, ‘I think the materials choose me. One of the questions I always ask is what do the objects want. Because sometimes it’s not only about what I want, it’s what the thing wants.’

Bronwyn Katz echoes this with the statement, 6

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‘I’m almost never the author. In the studio, when I make the work, I definitely make it for me. It’s for me to understand things, and for me to have conversations with particular people. Then, once it leaves the studio, anyone can get anything from it; it’s anything that it needs to be.’

Language finds itself wanting repeatedly.

In conversation with Mame-Diarra Niang, a French-speaking artist, Federica Angelucci joined in to quiet syntactic discord. With Portia Zvavahera, her husband Gideon Gomo at times mediated the artist’s thoughtlanguage of Shona to spoken English. In the early stages of my conversation with Dada Khanyisa, when he saw his words translated from isiZulu, he remarked ‘it just doesn’t sound the same’ – something had been lost.

In one of the most remarkable texts of 2017, one immense sentence in Hito Steyerl’s Duty-Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War proposes: ‘Contemporary art is a kind of layer or proxy which pretends that everything is still okay, while people are reeling from the effects of shock policies, shock and awe campaigns, reality TV, power cuts, any other form of cuts, cat GIFs, 7

Introduction

tear gas – all of which are all completely dismantling and rewiring the sensory apparatus and potentially also human faculties of reasoning and understanding by causing a state of shock and confusion, or permanent hyperactive depression.’

While this attests to the simultaneously glib and grand syncretism happening in our current visual culture, these conversations foreground the humanity behind our collective entanglement – despite and within structural calamity. These conversations evidence an enduring belief that the tangible is not totalising. Zvavahera recounts receiving word from her painting that it needed to be turned in order to say what it needed to say; for Claudette Schreuders, her sculptures articulate ‘the freedom to go for the highest thing’. Simphiwe Ndzube describes uncertainty as his most fertile ground, saying: ‘I seem to be obsessed with things transitioning and inhabiting multiple dimensions of being and becoming.’ Niang reiterates, ‘it was my eyes, it was my look, it was my way to see the world, the colours, the angles. It was not about the history, the violence; it was how I see the world and how 8

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I see myself inside the city, the country.’

Repeatedly, these conversations reflect a moment of unknowing, speculation rather than conclusiveness. Assertions are made on the basis of feeling as each artist unveils a cosmology of shifting personal deities, spanning childhood games, recurrent fascinations, a love for plants.

These discussions seem a display of some chimerical alchemy. They are reminders that despite the obscurantism endemic to contemporary art, sincerity is the driving impulse for any set of individuals who have dedicated their lives to the act of creation.

Zander Blom posits, ‘I think you can’t let go of beauty.’

A 2005 paper by Johanna Burton and Lisa Pasquariello describes the interview format as ‘not quite document, not quite literature, not quite propaganda, not quite staged voyeurism, not quite entertainment, not quite verifiable fact’, a statement I affirm as my biases show themselves through inflections and interjections. The references I employ span French semioticians, Japanese novelists and American curators, making apparent the neo-colonial biases in the 9

Introduction

South African education system and the dire need for epistemologies of the south. In these conversations with new acquaintances and familiar faces, both the questions and answers have been revised to bring them closer to what feels like the truth, something evidently fleeting and relative. Guy Tillim observes, ‘It’s all unknowable ultimately, so why create a simple projection? It’s a life quest as much as an image quest.’ In navigating cliché, misapprehension and expectation each artist demonstrates their generosity and fluidity of thought. Positionality is fixed but personhood is mobile, in 9 More Weeks; every utterance is true until it’s not, and that’s the best it can ever be.

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Dada Khanyisa

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By whatever means

Dada Khanyisa is known among Cape Town’s ‘creatives’.

He customises sneakers, makes bags and offers tattoos. His graduation exhibition at the Michaelis School of Fine Art caused a memorable ripple in the social current. During barside discussions about visibility and representation, students remarked that the familiarity of his visual language counteracted the alienating effect of that institution.

This conversation takes place in Khanyisa’s studio in downtown Cape Town as he works towards Bamb’iphone, his first solo exhibition. The studio has digital equipment, circular saws and chisels. Materials span oil and acrylic paints, denim and rubber; combining aged and fake wood, Khanyisa splices entire sections of chairs onto a work through a mixed-media technique he calls nakanjani – by whatever means.

Khanyisa’s work has a specifically South African aesthetic.

It is reminiscent of the painted barbershop signs that can be seen in townships spanning Gugulethu, Umlazi and Soweto; it echoes the album covers of 90s-era hip-hop and cartoons in publications like Bona. Yet it is unprecedented in the context of contemporary art; it is a subjective translation, the direct output of personal experience. Khanyisa writes: My focus on the human condition stems from the various spaces I have called home; these spaces create a multifaceted diagram of my reality. I understand that I have to greet strangers in rural KZN, keep my phone guarded while in central Joburg and ask a white mate to call the agent if I am looking for accommodation in Cape Town.

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The artist’s multi-dimensional materiality reckons with the prismatic nature of the Black South African experience.

Since early works such as Johustleburg (2017), What is this patriarchy you speak of? (2017) and eBree (2017), Khanyisa has taken the future and past into account when crafting his commentary on the present. The various scenes make room for the exhaustion of a matronly fruitseller and the watchfulness of a taxi-rank pickpocket. Khanyisa evenly charges all the characters in his paintings with interiority.

Slipping between vernac, isiZulu and English, Khanyisa narrates the conflicts of contemporary culture with a level of understanding that outstrips empathy and surpasses the romanticism of a tribute. One of the works intended for the upcoming show, Squad Goals (internet friends are not your real friends), features a self-portrait as a gesture that reflects his embeddedness in the context he discusses. When Khanyisa provides responses such as ‘it’s just how things are now’, he is decisive but not embittered; it’s a reiteration that his subjectivity stems from an attentive observation of contemporaneity.

The open-endedness of his narration is an attempt at precision. Disparities, contradictions and incongruities are the prevailing form. His expanded view of time collapses tropes, archetypes and essentialising packages of identities.

Khanyisa remarks, ‘You have to understand that the bad guy is not always the bad guy. The good guy is not always the good guy’ – his practice takes its departure from the limits of description. In Khanyisa’s contemporary social commentary, to be specific is not to be general but to be generous.

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Sinazo Chiya:

What are your visual references or influences?

Dada Khanyisa:

I enjoy going through Facebook event posts for nightclubs and stuff. And images from old Drum magazines. Images of people from reports about the taxi strikes. There’s something about all the images that come from this country that feels like they fit in with what I want to say.

You feel very rooted here, in this country and this present?

Yeah, I feel comfortable. I feel like this is home. That’s why I don’t know if I have any interest in living outside of the country, or going to Europe for residencies. I usually say I don’t want to go there because it’s cold. Maybe I’m backwards, I don’t know. Western culture bores me at times. But I’m curious about travelling upward.

Further up the continent?

Yeah. Go to Zimbabwe and learn how to carve stone, maybe live in a stone-carving village. A place like the Tengenenge Sculpture Village. Have you seen those stone carvings that are sold at markets, that shine so good? That’s where they are made. You stay there, contribute towards the village, and then you get a stone along with some tools. They don’t even give you a small stone – they give you a rock and say, ‘Okay start, you know what you are doing? Bash into it and see what happens …’

Or I’d like to go to Tanzania and learn to carve ebony. It’s illegal to cut down ebony trees – you have to get it in smaller portions. It grows freely along the north of Zimbabwe, Malawi 15

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and Tanzania. That’s where they carve most of the masks and wooden utensils. The wood is hard, almost like stone. Those are the kinds of things I want to do, like working with clay, weaving, basically working with my hands.

Despite your having studied animation?

Yes, I’m at peace when I work with my hands. It’s something I learned from my brother. We would chill and he’d show me how to make hunting weapons like slingshots. At the time I was really young, about four or five years old. We used to hunt for mice and braai them. He also taught me how to make wire cars.

He taught me all of that stuff. He’d make swings for me. He’d make scarecrows from TV references.

So you could hunt if you had to?

No, some of the stuff I’ve forgotten how to do, but I could probably still work with wire cars. He loved working with his hands, and I was always there with him. Opening batteries and taking things apart, especially the batteries with a gum-like substance inside. We would chew it like it was gum.

Hahaha, you guys would chew batteries? It sounds like a nice childhood actually.

That was before he hit puberty, before he wanted to be cool.

I also knew what I was doing and I carried on drawing.

How did you get involved with sneaker and street culture?

Growing up in Johannesburg, everywhere there’s a billboard.

The material culture is very …

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High key?

It’s very high key. It’s about what you’re wearing, what you’re driving, what you have and who you have around you. Whether you want to play along or not, it’s going to affect you. Even if you don’t want to play along, you are playing along. You are very aware of brands and what they mean; what brands are associated with success, making it and looking fresh. I remember we used to watch music videos and analyse pretty shoes.

I remember Pharrell and 50 Cent videos, like Window Shopper.

Music videos played a part in how I saw things; they provided alternative ways of being, maybe, a Pantsula. Especially when you were dealing with the dynamics of living in the suburbs but not being white. There’s that thing in Joburg where you had to write your area code on your chest. If you were from the north, everyone had to know that you’re from the north. If you were from the south, people must know. The high school you went to matters – did you go to Saints? Did you go to a public school?

Did you drive to school or did you take a bus? It’s those things that counted. You became aware of things that don’t really matter. You might not have a car, but clothing allowed you to flex in another way. Some people made a living from that. They call them ‘sneakerheads’ or ‘cool kids’. I gravitated towards the sneakerheads, and in the process I met the people at Nike when I started making miniature versions of popular sneakers. It was an interesting time. I ended up doing an Air Max campaign.

Those are the people I was around before I came through to Cape Town.

A campaign as in marketing?

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Yes, it was all about contemporary culture and the collection of sneakers. It was exciting to see how this opened up avenues for some people. It’s part of what’s happening right now, where people don’t have to have those strenuous nine-to-five jobs. I mean, there are people who love it, people who are built for it, but others are not. It’s nice to see that a lot of people don’t have to play by those rules. There are other ways of living.

Is it accurate to call your work social commentary?

I feel like it is.

I had to make sure.

You see these two works [pointing to the diptych ‘Khawu’phinde um’tryeh’ and Love Between Magenta Covers]? In the panel on the left there’s an image of a person who’s holding a phone, trying to send a message. Maybe it’s to say there is no electricity.

Or he could be sending it to his sister over there, in the panel on the right, who’s also holding a phone, and then she’s like, ‘I’m making a plan’. You see? Or he could be sending it to the father whose phone is on the table there upside down.

All the structural complexities …

It’s the classic story. Money does not reach home, and at home the grandmother and the kids are hungry. It’s a recurring theme and it shows that things are still the same, with a kitchen full of kids without their parents. Are we going to cook today, or are we going to organise some kota [a bunny chow/gatsby-type food sold in the townships] and buy chips?

So your paintings have down-to-earth narratives?

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Yeah, those kinds of narratives. But it’s not so obvious, because it’s also a pretty image and it’s nice to look at. If you want to know what lies beyond, then that’s a matter of conversation.

You’re trying to tell stories with a certain level of nuance?

Nowadays, people want you to create what makes them comfortable. You are expected to filter, you can’t touch on what will make someone else uncomfortable. What’s the point? Why filter the reality we all have to live through? The reason why it’s so difficult in the township is because you have so much to handle – there is no filter. People live unapologetically.

And they’re doing the best that they can at that time?

Exactly. So you have to understand that the bad guy is not always the bad guy. The good guy is not always the good guy. You might have relatives who are messed up, but you have to put up with them because this person is the one who always cooks when there’s a ceremony at home. You know? There are those characters.

There are things that redeem people – people have dysfunctions and they also have good aspects.

You see? It’s those stories I’m exploring.

Have you always wanted to tell stories?

I don’t think about it that way. You know, when you grow up things are planted in your head about what you want to study.

And you know parents don’t really take the arts seriously as a career path. My mom wanted me to be in the tourism industry.

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As a tour guide?

I don’t know. She just told me that she sees me in those big Jeeps and that uniform that they wear.

Hahaha, outdoors ... guiding people through lions and stuff?

But you know that’s her dream, and I’m glad that she didn’t persist or force me. I’m glad she supported me through my creative mission – even when she didn’t see the fruits of it all. I think the storytelling is just something most of us have as Black people. We have good storytellers, someone who tells you a story and you feel like you were there in it, and you are laughing.

That’s why in places where there are a lot of Black people it feels like everyone is in your business, because ...

Because everyone is in your business.

Exactly.

But it has its purpose. It’s like a vaccination against certain kinds of problems.

You cannot be alone. There are always people around. There’s no time for all the things I have time for when I’m in the ’burbs or the studio. Being in my own mind. In as much as the community can be intrusive, it is a cushion for most. So it’s multilayered, it’s not just a painful experience. Yes, there is pain …

But it’s bigger than that?

It’s bigger than the pain. You go on. It’s not like every day you wake up and you are like, ‘Oh snap! I am Black, I don’t have 20

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this, I have that, I owe this and I paid that.’ It’s not like that.

You will just be like, ‘Yo! It’s hot, let’s go to the beach.’ Just like everyone else.

You mention social media a lot. It also crops up in your work, the image of someone holding a phone. What is the interest?

You hold the phone the whole day, so you can’t ignore it. It’s also about being true to the times, documenting the times. Here is a photo I took when I was in grade seven; it was a fun day, we were having fun and looking good. Looking at it now tells you a lot about what people wore back then. If a painting is true to its time and you look at it in 10 years’ time, it will still reveal something about the time it was painted. Either how people were dressed, or how they styled their hair. I have the same appreciation when I look at Gerard Sekoto’s Yellow Houses. It’s from a time when I thought things were just black and white. I know those four-roomed houses. The composition, the houses he picked and how much he was showing says a lot about that time and how he saw it. It’s like when someone reminds you of a story that happened in the past and you think about it and you laugh. Like looking at a picture and being reminded that we used to wear knickerbockers. The currency of memories.

This is what connects us.

How do you see our time?

I’ve been taking photos when people are on their phones at parties. People checking how many ‘likes’ they got and seeing how many people have looked at their Insta Stories. People who go out to be seen taking selfies. It’s very excessive, especially in Johannesburg. It feels like that’s the culture.

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Do you feel like people are alienated?

I don’t think they are alienated. It’s just how things are now.

Why does multimedia have such an appeal for you? I read an interview where you called the medium ‘nakanjani’ [no matter what/by whatever means].

I think my whole journey, my beliefs and how I saw things, has influenced how my work has developed. So it has got to a point where I can just relax and any idea can be accommodated. There was a time in my life when I would be worried about how the work was going to be received. That does something to you, it does something to your psyche. So if I am happy with it, that’s enough. I don’t mind keeping things. So that when they don’t buy it, I’m not crushed. It will find a way back into what I’m doing because I like it, you see. That’s the thing with nakanjani.

I started doing tattoos because there was a gap in the market.

And then I started customising shoes because there was a gap, and then came the paintings. Everything has its place.

It’s not about the expectation of the viewer, it’s about making things that you find interesting. If it’s yours it’s gonna be yours, nakanjani.

You see, everything is accommodated. Any idea, any thought process, any visual outcome is accommodated. When I’m busy creating my work and I decide to add some grey, there’s going to be something else to counter that grey so that it makes sense visually. Doubt about whether something is going to be a good idea is very crippling and limiting.

So it’s about operating from both certainty and openness?

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Yeah, curiosity and being open to learn. Now I want to learn how to paint with oil. I’ve never painted with oil.

What were you using before?

Acrylics. I’m trying to work with oils in order to understand light.

You work with clay, you do illustration, you use wood, you’re trying out different paints. Do different mediums offer you different things?

I’m learning what they mean as I go, as I discover what works better, what is heavier, what is screwable, how many dimensions I can go with, what works visually and what looks good. Wood, for example, represents opulence for me. It feels royal. When your house is full of wooden things …

It’s a stately home?

You know? So I use it as a way to talk about opulence.

Your work is very detail oriented.

Your eye mustn’t sit in one place, that’s always the point. So that when you are looking at this, another thing over there calls for your attention. You don’t have to figure it out right there and then.

Must the object always be beautiful?

I think so. Not necessarily Beyoncé beautiful, but it must be pleasing to the eye. Maybe beauty is the wrong word – I am looking for visual harmony. It can be the oddest pairing of colour 23

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patterns that don’t make sense, but if your eye enjoys the visuals, it turns into a great pairing of colours.

I saw a quote of yours where you said, ‘I’d like to be so established that I can have 10 truckloads of sand dumped off at a gallery, filling the floor, and call it art.’ What did you mean by that?

I was just being sarcastic. I don’t want to be that person who doesn’t get to touch their work.

But we live in a world where that can happen.

I was more speaking of that moment where whatever you do gets validated. When your name has so much value that you can do the most basic thing and people will turn around and call it wonderful. So established that you don’t have to stress about the next deadline, or the next paycheck.

A point where you don’t have to worry.

Yeah.

You just did a mural for Afropunk in Joburg that was called The Afropolitan Tea Party. How did that happen?

They called for proposals, so I sent my proposal through, they liked it, and I started painting in December. I was there for two weeks.

How big was it?

It’s 35 metres wide and 5.5 metres high. I did it by myself, except for the first two days when my brother was helping.

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Oh my. How did people respond when they saw you at work?

It’s a busy site there at Constitution Hill. There’s Gautrain buses, there’s Metro buses, there’s taxis, cars, and there’s foot traffic. People were taking selfies as it came together. There were these people in the red tour buses – as the bus goes past you could see people with their cameras taking photos.

Proper tourists with their cameras?

Yeah. It was nice because the colour comes out as the sun shines directly on it, and it is big. I would get compliments from dodgy-looking guys who walked past. They would tell me that I knew what I was doing.

That’s amazing – art bringing people together.

It was actually really fulfilling. People were really good, the regular people like security guards, students, people walking past. It’s a dangerous spot. You could see that some of them are those people who look like they are about to go rob in the suburbs. You could see some were high on all sorts of drugs, but they would still pay me compliments about the work. If I had just been just standing there I would have been robbed.

Your art kept you safe?

It was very humbling. There’s another illustration that I would like to do on a building in Joburg. So if you know any connections in Joburg, I need to do this ... [Shows images] Think of this in Hillbrow, on the side of a building.

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That would be beautiful. The old Bafana Bafana t-shirt.

And that guy looks like someone’s uncle. That’s amazing.

That needs to go up somewhere.

Before my time is up on earth.

It’s good to have things to be excited about.

It’s going to be a good year.

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Zander Blom

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Here be monsters

This interview begins as Zander Blom conceptualises his exhibition Paintings and Posters (Stevenson Cape Town, March 2018) and resumes once the show has opened. After spending more than a decade submerged monastically in abstract painting, Blom talks about figuration as a strategy towards humour and lightness – an aesthetic return to childhood wonder. In the walkabout for this exhibition he admits, ‘One of my favourite things to do as a kid was try to come up with the best monster … let’s say lion’s teeth and pterodactyl wings, taking all the best parts of different animals to construct the most badass Frankenstein’s monsters. And when I started doing this, started going into the figurative universe, they started emerging again.’

His studio is strewn with washing lines holding crude drawings on pieces of cut-up canvas. The images depict car tyres, dinosaur appendages and reproductions of works by modernist artists. Dressed in black, covered in paint, Blom appears to be standing at a precipice, stating: ‘I’ve been looking for a way back into figuration after years of abstraction, and the only way I could find a good starting point to build a new alphabet for myself was to go back in time and into myself.’

The words ‘rules’ and ‘principles’ recur in the course of this conversation in a push-pull matrix of dogma and rebellion.

Blom has a personal lexicon of marks. He lists modernist painters, art movements and schools of thought liberally.

He has vandalised textbook images of Mondrian and drawn Rothko as the Grim Reaper with the assuredness of someone with a role to play in the canonical melodrama. His particular combination of devotion and scrutiny echoes that of a 29

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protagonist in a Künstlerroman. It is without irony that he says, ‘The only thing I know for sure is that I want to be an artist and make paintings.’

However, while the Künstlerroman is anchored on the artist’s acceptance of his vocation in the moment of certainty, Blom has a self-awareness that leads him to reckon with his positionality and his context. He observes that his former minimalism is better suited to someone living in Munich.

In this turn in his practice, the evasions of beauty are insufficient. Six years ago, in an interview with Odili Donald Odita, Blom said, ‘Painting has freed me from the need to justify my practice and allows me, on a daily basis, to learn new things about myself and the world.’ He now asks, ‘Sure enough I’m delving deeper into my own weird brain, but is it enough? Is this enough?’

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Sinazo Chiya:

In your newest work, art history makes quite a playful, almost childlike appearance.

Zander Blom:

You see that thing behind you, that weird green face with the yellow teeth?

Oh my god! That is wild. Like a goat wizard.

Right? The goat wizard’s head is that famous Picasso sculpture of the bicycle seat. All I’ve done is given him a weird jungle face with yellow teeth and he’s smoking a pipe that’s from a self-portrait of Cézanne. The wizard hat is just a wizard hat and the palm tree is made of a Brâncus,i structure. The dog hanging from the palm tree is Giacomo Balla’s famous Futurist painting of the little dachshund running. In a way the goat wizard is the closest that I’ve come to doing something very honest. Something that resembles my memory of the murals we made at home. I’ve been looking for a way back into figuration after years of abstraction, and the only way I could find a good starting point to build a new alphabet for myself was to go back in time and into myself. I’ve dropped the belief in the transcending power of abstraction, and it feels like I don’t have any rules any more. Sure enough I’m delving deeper into my own weird brain, but is it enough? Is this enough? [Gestures at new paintings in the studio.]

Do you think you’d be able to recognise ‘enough’ if you encountered it?

I don’t know. I think I recognise ‘possible’ at the moment. But I don’t know what to paint really. I find it incredibly difficult to 31

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commit to something. For some reason I can commit to these dinosaur monster things at the moment.

There’s a dinosaur on your website.

I can commit to that because it reminds me of my childhood and wanting to draw monsters. Like putting scales and claws on everything. To me that’s an honest personal thing and maybe it makes sense because it’s so universal. I’m cool with drawing a Brâncus,i sculpture into a palm tree or whatever, but what can you draw or paint that is really worth painting?

What keeps you wanting to be an artist?

It goes back to my mom’s desire to be in an environment with things that she made. To create your surroundings, live with what you make and enjoy that thoroughly. The thing that I enjoy is to make a room full of paintings and then have them sent away – have every single painting taken out of the room.

Then you remake the environment, and it’s so exciting.

You start all over again?

Yeah, I make a whole bunch of new paintings and the room feels completely different. I think the craziness of the work in the studio at the moment unhinges me a little, because it doesn’t have any gravity. I feel a bit dishevelled, because this painting is like a disorganised desk. At the moment I want to make things that move me and dishevel me and make me feel quite crazy.

So you’re prepared to be a bit dishevelled now?

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I have to be. I can work on these new paintings very casually. I can sit and have a beer and make some drawings. I don’t have to be intensely focused on making that perfect line in the corner, and stand on the ladder and bend halfway over to get the right scope. I’m buying myself a little bit of freedom; I’m allowed to be a bit dishevelled and to make a new context where the rules are looser. I’m hoping that I can build more and more things like that weird little creature [gestures to a piece of canvas] – it’s almost like a cat witch.

That’s amazing. Why the animals?

Animals are disarming. When it’s humans we ask all sorts of questions that I’m not interested in.

Then it becomes a trap of signification.

You will remember that Okwui Enwezor took people like Candice Breitz to task for representing other people’s bodies, other people’s stories, other people’s pain. That made a big impact on me, because as a teenager I made portraits of all different kinds of people: friends, family, strangers I met on the street, guys who worked at the scrapyard, people on a train or a bus, a barber giving someone a shave, etc. I photographed them, some with consent, some without, and then made etchings and woodcuts and paintings. Suddenly that felt so completely wrong.

These people’s lives were none of my business, their likeness not mine to reproduce, their stories not mine to tell. So I figured it’s better to stay off that battlefield. Shortly after that I got out of figuration altogether for a very long time.

There’s safety in rats, hahaha.

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You can have spotted rats, purple and blue rats, dead rats, zombie rats. No one cares. But if you want to be in the world of people, the world of faces and identities, then you really have to know what you are doing and why you are doing it. You have to take responsibility for how you represent your subject. You enter into a contract.

Are you saying your abstraction is a political choice?

One of the things I was saying to myself about the perfectly clean work I was making a while ago was that I was lying to myself about the world I live in. It would make perfect sense if I was a German artist living in Munich, but it makes no sense to be making that kind of work as a South African. But I can’t make overtly political work either. On paper I’m an Afrikaans white male from Pretoria, so you have to ask yourself what you want to see from that demographic, and what you don’t want to see. What picture would I choose from the newspaper to paint, and with what picture would I juxtapose it, and what would I be saying with the juxtaposition of those two images? What right would I have to say anything like that? Zanele Muholi is a perfect example of someone who ...

Who can say things?

Who is who she is. Who speaks her truth. She doesn’t speak someone else’s truth. She doesn’t say something for some opportunist reason. She is what she is and that’s amazing, and the work that she’s doing is amazing and necessary. There’s a lot of stuff like that, but to think that everything has to be in that political realm …

I feel like I understand what you mean.

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I don’t even know who I’m supposed to be or what I want to do. I really don’t like being an Afrikaans white male South African, but that’s the position I was given. When I was younger it was easier to dismiss it, because it was the older people who were arseholes. And now it’s like no, no, no, you’re still the arsehole, you’re not a kid anymore. Now you are just a white male arsehole. When I was younger I thought I had escaped that.

Because of your position, who are you? The only thing I know for sure is that I want to be an artist and make paintings.

Is this an attempt at reinvention?

Yeah. I look at Picasso and I look at Matisse and either they are painting nudes, figures holding hands, a woman and another woman, or a weird monster. So it’s either figures or still lifes, or a landscape here and there, but that’s it. Do I want to paint a figure? No. Do I want to paint a still life? Maybe, but not really.

What would I paint a still life of? If I paint a figure what would I paint, a picture of my wife, Dom? I don’t know. Do I really want to make a painting of my wife? Do I want to make a selfportrait? Who the fuck wants to see my self-portrait?

Take me through your process.

I’ve been wanting to do work like this for a while, but the language developed through the Mondrian drawings I was doing. Only after 400-odd drawings of that sort did I develop a language that I could start bringing into painting; a way to bring that smaller scale to a bigger scale where it makes sense.

You can’t make the same marks with a brush and have them look convincingly awkward and crude and childlike. I’m using oil bars because they’re basically big crayons. If you try and do it with the wrong medium it’s not going to work, and if you 35

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overthink it it’s not going to work. Like the wing of this weird bat thing – it was a painting that I cut up because I wanted to use part of it ... Then there are three different types of canvas.

One is cotton duck, one is a fine weave of Belgian linen and one is a course weave of Belgian linen. They are all primed with universal primer on one side. I work on both the primed sides and the raw sides.

You start by cutting the canvas shapes?

Yes, I’ll go into that room and cut random sizes of canvas off the rolls, knowing that I need to do some small ones, medium ones and big ones. Sometimes I’ll have an idea of what I’m going to paint and that will help determine some of the sizes and choices, but a lot of it is random, and about having a nice variety. Most things are done with the oil sticks. I also use regular oil pastels for more delicate lines.

What are those piles on the table?

I have a folder for general art history, a folder for animals, a folder for South African art history. And then I have printed-out notes of basic ideas, and long lists of things to paint. I also make PDFs that are filled with reference images from the internet that I print out and work from.

So you wanted your work to be more cerebral?

More selfish. I wanted to spend less time consumed by process, and more time reading. With my previous work I just followed where the process led me. I had set up certain parameters from the outset, but the process drove itself. I didn’t have to go look for new ideas in books or elsewhere, I just had to be open and 36

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receptive to the paint and the canvas. If you pay attention to the mixing and the smearing and the scraping and the dripping and the throwing, the process will tell you what to do, where to go.

It seemed to take its own road, solve its own problems. With the new work the process is no longer in the driver’s seat; instead the ideas and references lead the way.

Are the compositions randomly arranged?

To a large degree. The dry unstretched paintings are all over the studio in piles. I’ll pick some and arrange them on a big stretched canvas on the floor. I’ll move them around until it feels right and then I’ll stick them down. The end result isn’t really a painting in the same sense that it used to be. Now it’s an arrangement of paintings on a painting. A bunch of small paintings inside a painting.

Quotes perhaps?

The Pollock-like elements are not copies of specific works, but they are using his method. On the other hand, the Ellsworth Kelly and Mondrian panels are direct reproductions, but done in a method or technique quite opposite to theirs. I don’t know if it would be technically correct to call these things quotes.

How do you find working with the canvas on the floor as opposed to upright?

It’s a bit like making pottery, where there’s always an ‘aha’ moment at the end when you open up the kiln. With an upright painting you always see the image because our eyes are trained to understand the painting as a whole, but when it’s flat on the floor I can sense that the composition works but you don’t truly 37

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see it until it’s up. This stops me from being overly pedantic while I’m working on it. I’m more inclined to just fill the space with stuff until the canvas is full. It’s a bit like playing Tetris.

So you don’t miss the spills? The oil halos?

One of the things that I wanted really badly was to make flat paintings. And halos are generally a result of thick impasto.

Flat how?

Flat in the sense that it doesn’t have this protruding oil paint and dripping linseed oil. It’s a totally different challenge. For years I couldn’t pull off a flat painting. It just never worked. What really worked was thick chunky stuff. It started to frustrate me that I wasn’t able to figure out a way to make a flat painting that was compelling.

How do you decide when it’s done and how do you decide when to start again?

If the pieces all just fit, and there are enough elements to make it worth looking at, then I glue them all down. Sometimes once it’s upright you can see that it needs something extra. In the exhibition there was a large painting where, when I finished gluing all the elements on the floor, it looked great for a day or two. But then it became clear that it needed something more.

Eventually I added the flowers.

I know you helped paint murals and made jewellery and things in your parents’ house. Are you going back to your childhood?

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I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts about the illusion of agency, the illusion of free will. You are born into certain circumstances with certain genes and what you end up doing with your life is like the inevitable result of all that. You can’t be other than what you’re going to be. My situation was a mom who was an artist, craftsperson, jeweller, potter, painter, all of that. The way I bonded with her was through art. My parents had a small semidetached house in Strand when we were kids, and we’d repaint the outside every couple of years. My mom would paint a pot on the wall with plants coming out of it, and then a lion and birds. There was an underwater scene at the back of the house with fishes. Every room was painted a different colour; we had gold stars spraypainted on the ceilings, stuff like that. Living in that kind of environment made me realise how much you can transform your environment.

Do you feel like you were doomed to be an artist?

Pretty much. So many people start doing something by getting recognition from their parents. You tell a joke at the table and your parents laugh and then you become a comedian. Also, I was bad at everything else.

You mentioned your mother. Tell me about your dad.

My father came from quite bad poverty. His parents were both blind, and they had five blind children. They are from Ventersdorp, which is an archconservative little town in the middle of nowhere. His father was a piano tuner. For someone from that kind of background it was unimaginable to let your kids study art. They have to do something useful.

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Something practical.

Yeah. The compromise was that I was allowed to study design, but two years into the course I realised I did not aspire to drive an Audi and have a nice flat in Killarney. I would rather be broke and do what I want to do. I dropped out and moved to Brixton because I had a school friend whose parents bought him a house there. I rented a room in his house and just started making stuff.

I organised group shows at the house with friends.

Where did art history come in?

I think I’ve always felt that I needed to prove something because I didn’t have a university degree. I grew up looking at Mondrian and Picasso and all that stuff because of my mom. The only thing that really interested me was art, so in the end I ended up making art about art. As I was working, I more and more wanted to get rid of the image. And obviously the more you try to get rid of the image, the more you end up with abstraction. It really made sense for me then to delve into what abstraction meant in art history, and what I can get from that history, but I also realised I could use abstraction as an alibi to escape having to be political, to escape identity politics or the body and memory and all that stuff.

So what is next?

Maybe at some point dealing with my own time, because that’s something I’ve really struggled with. I mean, there’s a pizza in one of the drawings, and maybe a microwave or a computer screen … I think maybe that’s the way forward for me.

A leap through time?

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Yeah. Just to get with my own time and not be such a weirdo.

It’s as if you’ve reached a point where pure abstraction is boring. Is the only thing available now figuration?

That’s true, and I wonder if figuration is just a rebound or if I’m actually slowly working towards a deeper figuration. Something that is deeper and more raw. I started being more interested in people like Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, Basquiat, Philip Guston, Anne Ward and Rose Wylie.Yet the simplicity of that Rothko …

The transcendent power?

Yeah, and you can find that transcendent power in a scribble.

You can make something ugly, but because it’s painted with a certain type of paint with a certain technique on a certain surface, and installed in a certain way, it can have that same kind of transcendent power and more.

Maybe because I studied art history, I still believe in resonance. As in feeling some kind of weird affinity to an image, almost physically.

Do you mean that the object needs to be compelling? It might be a bad painting, but it has to be a good bad painting?

Yes, in a sense. For me that is still a guiding principle when I look at paintings. I adore Barnett Newman to this day – those lines, and that surface, and that thing beyond words. That unspeakable thing.

I think you can’t let go of beauty. Some of the perfect references for me are late Picassos, where he really doesn’t care anymore.

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It’s some of the ugliest stuff you’ve ever seen, but now it’s one of the biggest influences on a lot of contemporary painting. I also still believe in the idea that a painting should be completely handmade. I believe you need to limit yourself in order to do something. Because if everything is possible, nothing is possible.

With your last show I know you were circling around the question of whether to go deeper, to refine a specific mode, or to continue the reinvention of the pathway.

For a while my rules were ‘no verticals, just horizontals’, and I wanted to see if I could do that. There was a peacefulness that came with that. Then I focused on the textured blocks that I was making. But at some point I got bored of that. I kept looking at the work and saying this is cool but it’s not enough. I’d have this conversation with Dom all the time. She’d say, ‘oh that’s beautiful’, and I’d respond, ‘yeah, it is beautiful, but it’s not enough, is it?’, and she’d say, ‘yeah, it’s not enough’. To be a serious artist in the time we live in, it’s not enough to make a couple of blocks with a beautiful texture. The texture is just a trick.

End of an era?

It’s about time. I would be an arsehole if I stopped here, if you know what I mean. Straight up abstract painting is not enough, and it’s not really that interesting to me anymore. I have to go deeper into my own weird brain and who I am at my core. I don’t think anyone really knows who they are. I mean, I’d love to have a position, to argue that I believe in this and this, and I come from this hectic place and I can tell a story. I could make that, but none of it is interesting to me. The best I can do is just delve deep into my own weirdness, and see where that can go. And I suppose that starts with doodling.

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3.

Bronwyn Katz

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Play is political

Bronwyn Katz says she doesn’t have time for a hobby, that any miscellaneous activity she takes up will be recruited into her work. This conversation begins as Katz takes up a residency in the Netherlands and resumes as she starts another in Paris – the works from the latter forming the basis of a solo exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo. Katz is industrious. Her essential reads are the works of bell hooks and Audre Lorde. She is part of a collective of black women artists named iQhiya. They seek to ‘contest and transform invisible institutional lines that consciously or unconsciously continue to marginalize black female voices in the art world’.

She does not recede from the political weight of her identity, she centres it critically.

In the World, the latest compendium by influential art critic Ashraf Jamal, employs the term ‘identity politics’ nine times.

He describes the phenomenon as dangerously exclusionary, toxic, reductive, deterministic and operating on ‘divisive circuitry’. The contextualising passages suggest that the centering of identity politics comes at the expense of an expansive sense of self, that artists engage this at their peril.

Conversation with Katz advances a different point of view.

Katz describes herself as an orange – both the colour and the fruit. A critical component of her practice is humour and play. She notes, ‘For me, womanhood involves play. Growing up, I saw so many women deal with trauma and pain through play. Through laughter, through humour. That’s important.’

She echoes a statement by Dr Pumla Dineo Gqola, saying: ‘It is crucial to begin to make new memories of embodiment: forms that encourage pleasure and power … And it should be possible to continue to think critically and insurgently about 45

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what play means sexually, politically, spiritually and anyother-ly.’ Katz crafts her subjectivity from an impulse towards play and creation rather than division and restriction. She is propelled forward by humour and a need to create known parameters anew.

A well-circulated quote by Chinua Achebe reads: ‘Privilege, you see, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination; it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity.’

Katz, like Simphiwe Ndzube and Dada Khanyisa, signals a generation of artists who have taken the time to understand their lack of privilege but expend energy not on the tragedy of this privation but the sensitivity they are afforded in its place.

Katz’s affirmation of her blackness and her womanhood – born in South Africa, a country where the topsoil of history has proven too fragile for our attempts at burial – is an articulation of the fact that she is an inheritor of generational trauma, but it also functions as a declaration that she is dispossessed of generational shame. It is without fantasy or ignorance that Katz reflects the emancipatory potential of the politics of race, class and gender.

In the following text Katz announces herself as an individual, a fruit, a creator, a member of a community, a storyteller, a listener in the story of the life of a material and various other things which remain open to intuitive renegotiation. The politicised dimensions of her identity are not an impediment or a feature to be lucratively employed.

This is not a disparagement but a source of reflective pride.

It is the wellspring that energises her imagination.

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Sinazo Chiya:

How did you end up in the Netherlands?

Bronwyn Katz:

Nkule [Mabaso] and Manon [Braat] contacted me last year and told me about a show of South African artists they were working on called Tell Freedom, at a small museum in Amersfoort.

Myself, Donna Kukama, Buhlebezwe Siwani and Ashley Walters were chosen to do residencies in Amsterdam. The curators wanted us to look at the historical colonial relationship between the Netherlands and South Africa. Or what it means for me as a South African to be here.

And did you uncover anything?

The first two days I spent in bed. The area where I was staying, the Bijlmer, is home to a lot of people from former Dutch colonies. I went to the local library and saw some books about language, and I asked about the different types of Dutch, because I speak Afrikaans which is a Dutch creole. I found out there are so many variations of Dutch that have been created by people from the post-colonies of the Netherlands.

That is an interesting point of departure. I know that you use language in a very specific way in your work, and your works are often titled in Afrikaans. What is your connection to language? Aside from being born and raised in Kimberley, what is the significance of using Afrikaans for you?

The reason I use the language in my art is to work against a very particular false history established about the language.

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emerged when slaves were forced to speak Dutch. I use Afrikaans in my work as a political tool to show ownership, to establish the authority that it is my language. I also use it as a way of communicating with my ancestors. All of my known ancestors speak Afrikaans. I believe I make my work with my ancestors; they are in the studio with me. When I title work in English, it never feels honest.

When you say that you make your work with your ancestors, does that mean there is a specific spiritual dimension to that process?

I understand it as a conversation, in particular a conversation with my great-grandmother. I hadn’t thought of it as a spiritual practice. It’s just like a thought, a thought that grows. In simpler terms I could say it is a conversation with myself, but it doesn’t feel like a conversation with myself; it’s a conversation with my great-grandmother. If that makes sense.

What does play mean for your practice? I came across something you wrote on Facebook:

Context: My artistic practice has been described by myself and others as being playful and centered on spatial and structural politics.

Firstly, play is political, play is power, play is not separate from womxnhood – Humour and play in many contexts serves as a tool for healing, it serves as a coping mechanism for many womxn and for oppressed communities around the world – Play/humour is a portrait of womxnhood, it is a significant portrait of womxn joy, of womxn self care

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I wrote that post because someone disinvited me from a panel because they said my work didn’t speak to womanhood. I think that person had set limitations on what womanhood is. For me, womanhood involves play. Growing up, I saw so many women deal with trauma and pain through play. Through laughter, through humour. That’s important. We can’t all just make work about our trauma, about our experiences. Yes, all of that is important, but as important is showing joy and showing play.

Is that why your videos incorporate childhood games?

In part, but childhood games also speak of remembered actions and remembered places.

Speaking of memory, do you feel as if you’ve come to a certain understanding, or is it a process of uncovering every time?

Not yet. When I started to work with memory, personal history or even just histories in general, I did so while at university. That meant I was already compromising a lot. As a Black woman, I was losing a lot of myself in that institution, and replacing it with other things that I was taught, and it became important to work in a way in which I tried to remember the other self, the time that I had evolved out of. I’m continuously becoming other selves, and I’m continuously needing to remember. It’s a continual process.

Are all these selves, past and present, all happening at once, psychologically, spiritually, visually?

Yeah.

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You mention making space a lot. What does this mean for you?

I moved to Joburg last year, but I’ve been thinking very seriously about coming back to Cape Town, because of the lack of space for Black artists in that city. It’s easier to claim space in Joburg, partly because it is easier to afford space. Black artist-run spaces are very scarce in Cape Town. It is important that we make spaces for ourselves. Not always trying to fit into what already exists.

Owning our own things ... … and reimagining what ‘artist’ and ‘space’ could be. What does a Black-artist-run space look like? My thinking of this is not just exhibitions, but practical things. A studio space; a community space.

Community matters very much to you.

Yeah.

You often speak of agency. As much as the infrastructure of our art world is what it is, you stress that Black creators have agency at all times, and that is part of your drive to make work.

Definitely. The initial loss of self when entering an institution like a university is such a big loss, because there’s so little of yourself to grab onto and be deliberate about. It is so important for whoever should come after to lose less of themselves when they come, because space has been made and they can take it up.

Could you ever imagine putting roots down elsewhere?

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The more I’ve been travelling, the more I’ve realised the importance of being at home and making work at home.

There’s work that needs to be done and I want to be part of that work.

Are you saying that artists have an obligation to function socially, even when their practices are deeply individual and personal?

To each their own. I mean, I don’t think art can solve all the world’s problems, but I do believe artists serve a role. Not to change everything, but to make space for ourselves and for others like us.

Would you ever go back into academia?

I would like to. It’s actually a conversation I had last night with the artist who is staying here with me. At the moment I’m not ready, but I also think things need to change within academia.

In terms of how we are taught, the relationship between student and lecturer, all of that. Everyone can learn from the classroom so I think it’s something I need to prepare myself for, to go back, and there’s a lot of alternatives to it.

You participated in the 12th Dakar Biennale, you participated in the last Documenta. Did you feel an affinity with those institutions, or communities, or is making space here more of a priority for you right now?

I think South Africa remains at the core of my concerns, like number one. Dakar was important for me because it was my first time seeing what African artists were making all over the world. Like physically seeing, not in a textbook. It was my first 51

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time engaging with artists from other continents, and from other African countries. I just learned a lot.

You did an interview for an online publication called Clementine Zine and they asked you what inspires you to create. You responded that you make sense of the things around you through stories. What did you mean by that?

I was speaking of a video I made called Grond Herinnering. In it I use a letter that my grandmother wrote to me, and in the letter she speaks about my great-grandmother. That is an example of how I use stories.

You process narratives that are passed down between generations, and then you communicate them through your work as your own way of making sense of them?

Yes, basically.

Has your idea of making work changed since you left the academy?

I suppose there’s much more freedom. I definitely read a lot still, but the way my reading informs my work is looser than it was during my time at the institution. It is more informed by material at this stage.

I had a recent conversation with a friend who expressed apprehension about making works that can be seen as abstract, because it can seem as in some way depoliticised. You make beautiful, often abstract objects.

How do you relate to that tension?

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You know, for me more than three parts to a work is a lot. More than three different aspects to one piece is really overwhelming for me, on a sensory and intuitive level. And I also believe that you don’t have to use a body to be political. I use my material in an abstract way, but it has its own history. A very political history, a very embodied use. The beauty of abstraction is that I’m not giving you things to talk about. Materials can be enough, there is really little for me to do. I believe in the history. How it was made. Who made it.

As much as you make the object, you are not the author of meaning?

I’m almost never the author. In the studio, when I make the work, I definitely make it for me. It’s for me to understand things, and for me to have conversations with particular people.

Then, once it leaves the studio, anyone can get anything from it; it’s anything that it needs to be.

What do the different mediums offer you that makes them so appealing?

They are tools I select according to the requirements of an idea. Sometimes what I need to say is easiest to say in a video.

Sculpture is more immediate …

What you do with metal is very delicate, but you’re using tough, hard materials. Things that need bending to your will. It is such a combination of force and sensitivity.

What is going on when you make?

A lot of it is play – that’s where the thinking and the conversation

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come in. I untwine a lot of springs, and intertwine others. While I’m doing this thing over and over, I’m thinking, I’m talking to myself, I’m talking to others, but also playing. Things are disassembled. I’m rethinking how the spring could be.

Is it the same with sponge, with the softer aspects of your work?

I actually worked with sponge before I worked with the springs.

The first time I worked with the material, I didn’t intend to make a foam sculpture. I wanted to use it as a solution for another artwork. I was stacking bricks on top of each other, and I was wrapping them with cloth. I realised that if something like that falls, it could kill somebody. So I thought, okay, let me put foam on the top part of the brick, so that if it does fall it doesn’t hurt anyone. At the time I was really broke. I didn’t have money to buy and cut new foam, so I went to a second-hand shop and I got a mattress and I figured I would just cut it up. It didn’t work because it was very flimsy. So whenever I tried to stack the mattress bricks it would come tumbling down. I never really solved that – it was a very dangerous sculpture.

Anyway, I ended up having all these cut pieces of foam in my studio. Having them in my studio made me think about the fact that I just cut up someone’s bed. I wondered about the idea of rest, you know, of sleep. I tried to put the bed back together, but I hadn’t taken note of where the pieces came from. I just cut it up.

So that was hard.

Your process is very intuitive, you follow the material and you follow the ideas. How does that work for your videos?

I’m sure you need a script, you need a costume, etc. How do you incorporate your humour and playfulness into your film-based works?

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It’s easy to play in a video. Take the one where I’m clapping.

Initially, I was going to stand in one place and clap my hands.

Then I started changing the choreography. It’s a very simple video to shoot, and I probably shot it over 50 times – each time I thought about something new to do.

Did you end up using any new materials in Amsterdam?

I ended up sourcing stones from the Bijlmer, the area where we lived. It is a predominantly Surinamese area where a lot of people from the Netherlands’ former colonies live. It is in the middle of a wave of gentrification, so lots of buildings are being demolished, spaces rebuilt. I was interested in walking around in the area and collecting rocks … small pieces of rock that I joined together with wire.

What do you do when you are not making work?

I would like to have a hobby, but it’s difficult as an artist because everything can be art. If I started dancing, I would start to wonder how I can incorporate the dancing into my art.

Do you read much?

Currently I’m reading bell hooks’ Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center.

She’s absolutely revolutionary.

And ahead of her time. The stuff that she wrote in the 1990s just speaks volumes right now. I’m also reading a short text

by Audre Lorde: The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.

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The title says everything. One last question. I saw this funny quote where you describe yourself as an orange, both the colour and the fruit.

Ah! I bought a beanie today, an orange beanie to make me feel better.

Is it your favourite colour?

I just like orange and I relate. I think it’s a misunderstood colour, but it’s also a very happy colour. The orange is like healing, like Vitamin C. Hahaha. I don’t know if that’s the answer you wanted, but that’s just the truth.

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4.

Kemang Wa Lehulere

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The malleability of meaning

The term ‘hollowed-out signifier’ has been used recently to suggest that something has been consumed into absurdity.

While its academic origin lies in the semiotic work of Ferdinand de Saussure and Stuart Hall, it’s apparent in memes made from disaster photography, ‘covfefe’ and the wearing of lens-less prescription spectacles. The phrase implies a vacancy in the operations of cultural logic; that a tear has been made in the fabric of meaning. However, Kemang Wa Lehulere takes a different point of view. For him, meaning that aspires to be concrete invites suspicion.

This conversation occurs at Wa Lehulere’s studio in Maitland, following his return from Performa in New York, where he won the Malcolm McLaren Award for ‘an innovative and thoughtprovoking performance’, and during the conceptual stages of the exhibition that was to become Here I am, a concrete man, throwing himself into abstraction. He states: ‘My focus is on materiality, on trying to really explore the materials that I’ve been working with, purely for the sake of the material. Of course there is a conceptual thread that runs through most of the work, including my current projects. I just haven’t found the vocabulary for it.’

In ‘Left in silence’, an essay in Wa Lehulere’s Bird Song catalogue, Carlos Gamerro and Victoria Noorthoorn posit: ‘Sometimes, a whole system is metonymically concentrated in one of its elements, such as the pencils used by apartheid enforcement authorities to segregate whites from blacks …

Paradoxes lie at the heart of Wa Lehulere’s work: the pencil will render you speechless.’ While Wa Lehulere is known for his precision and his ability to concentrate systems in objects, in this conversation he demonstrates that his is a process of 59

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hollowing rather than saturating. To make objects thick with implication he strips them of definition. Though his extensive means of research is framed as ‘re-education’, in previous discussions he states ‘part of making work is to question meaning’. He combines jazz, African indigenous knowledge and ideas from Latin American writers to abstract familiar objects into something more resonant than the sum of their parts. On the notion of ‘falling’ alone, he states: ‘[There] are conceptual threads and relationships that will take quite a long time to solidify or understand properly, even for myself’. It’s from balancing chance, instinct and studied unknowing that Wa Lehulere arms a pencil with devastating impact.

If a lack of exactitude has been clandestinely villainised, this conversation reflects Wa Lehulere’s strategies around challenging this position. Rather than subscribe to authoritarian views, he emphasises the malleability of meaning. He holds it to account, remarking: ‘We ascribe meaning through the power that we have. Either assumed or given.’ The symbolic weight of desks, bibles, soil, historical events, water and shoelaces is hollowed out to make meaning ungovernable. Wa Lehulere places the agency of the viewer and the object in the vacant space left by the signifier; he reconfigures new neural networks by discarding traditional associative links. The following conversation suggests that not only is less more, nothing is the quickest route to something.

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Sinazo Chiya:

You just came back from New York, where you presented a new performance for Performa. How was it working with RoseLee Goldberg?

Kemang Wa Lehulere:

She is a powerhouse. It was great working with her. The project was structured in such a way that when she came and visited my South African studio, there was not much she could see except for the objects. The project consisted of choreography, sculptures and music elements; it was quite a complex process. She largely left me to my own devices with regards to the work, until the very end, when she attended our rehearsal and made some very useful suggestions.

Did the sculptures inform the choreography, or was it the other way around?

Both. The process began with Chuma Sopotela, a performer/ choreographer, and myself sitting down and looking at previous works that I’d done. From the beginning I wanted to animate my earlier imagery. For example, the pieces I’ve done with the aeroplanes, those are things that are still or frozen as sculptures, but they suggest movement. They are things that come from childhood games and memories. So the design of the wooden airplanes was based on paper planes, and paper planes are activated by throwing them through the air. Similarly with the sculptures of tyres and crutches, those come from childhood games that we used to play, but again as artworks they are kind of frozen. There’s also the installation with the swings, which evoke movement, but as installations they had not been activated before. So Chuma and I looked at those kinds of elements. We began like that, but then the work was informed 61

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by other research that I’ve been doing, or attempting to do, and conversations that I’ve been having with a number of people.

Could you tell me more about this research?

Initially I was interested in African indigenous knowledge and ideas around astronomy or astrology or cosmology. Prior to working on this project I saw them as one thing, but I learned that they are actually quite different. I looked at research into the Egyptian pyramids, and into star constellations. I found out about Sirius B, which is a star constellation also known as the Dogon Star. It was named after the Dogon people because they knew about the star constellation long before western scientists ‘discovered’ it. Of course this kind of history is very racialised, in the sense that the Dogon people are very dark-skinned and they used to live very simple lives. How could these people know about Sirius B without the technological equipment of western scientists? Some of the material I was looking at suggested that they must have been descendants of Egyptians, because of the kind of advanced knowledge that the Egyptians had with regards to astronomy. Those were conversations I was having with a friend who is an astrophysicist, Sukuma Mkhize. Initially he was meant to be part of the project, but it became too much for me in the end to work with Chuma for the movement, to work with Daniel Bruce Gray for the musical instruments, and then Sukuma on the more conceptual and theoretical level. In the end I had to narrow it down and allow it to unfold on its own, let the objects carve their own path in relation to the choreography.

How does this new body of research connect with the collective and personal histories you have been exploring over the past few years?

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I am still discovering that myself. It started with researching particular dates. I was looking at June 16, 1976, the student protest in Soweto, but also 11 August 1976, its Cape Town iteration. I don’t remember how I stumbled across this fact, but it turned out that 11 August had a full moon. This led me to seek out Sukuma, because I was curious about what this could mean. I was just following threads and traces, looking at certain events and incidents without necessarily focusing on the obvious violence and trauma.

Like a poetic translation of memory?

Yeah. But it was also a re-education for myself, filling in gaps in the bodies of knowledge I was taught at school – the parts of history of which we were deprived.

What are you excited about right now? You produced a jazz album with the trumpet player Mandla Mlangeni for your travelling exhibition Bird Song. Should we expect more music?

My focus is on materiality, on trying to really explore the materials that I’ve been working with, purely for the sake of the material. Of course there is a conceptual thread that runs through most of the work, including my current projects. I just haven’t found the vocabulary for it yet. With regards to music, the difficulty is that it takes a long time to develop music because it involves working with other people, having to sync schedules. This can be a nightmare, because people are busy and doing their own things. When I am working alone, like for my next show, I can work till 10, past midnight, two in the morning, three in the morning, I’m not dependent on anyone. I am driving the project fully.

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But you do find collective processes compelling. You’ve done extensive research on Black collectives working under apartheid, and you have worked as part of various collectives over the years: first Gugulective, then the Dead Revolutionaries Club, the Center for Historical Reenactments, and most recently Pumflet, co-founded with the architect Ilze Wolff. What does collaboration mean to you?

There are political reasons and ideas around community.

I grew up in a time when the Black community was glued together. The social fabric was much tighter back then; since 1994 people have become increasingly individualistic. When I was growing up, you were not just your mother’s child, you were the child of every older woman in the neighbourhood.

If you did something wrong they had a right to reprimand you. I also played lots of team sports – cricket, soccer, rugby, volleyball, I even tried handball. Then there is my experience with theatre, and later television. These are all disciplines in which you are interdependent with other people. If you are a director, you rely on actors, the DOP, the sound guy, the lighting dude … I learned more from theatre and television than I ever did at school.

Do you think you will always keep working like that?

The busier I get with my individual work the harder it gets.

And now I am also a father …

You are always part of a collective in that way.

Hahaha. Exactly! That is the most important collective now.

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You have moved from the erasable chalkboards (which you still do) to wall carving, which is something much more permanent. Is that part of your investigation of materials? From things that get wiped away to things that can stay, but are moved around? Is that a trajectory?

I never thought of it as carving, but rather scratching onto the wall. The interest in the wall drawings came from observation of walls in Gugulethu and other townships towards the end of apartheid. Looking at what kind of mark-making was left on walls in public. There is an iconic image by Jürgen Schadeberg of some Black dudes sitting on a pavement, and behind them there’s a wall with a text that says, ‘We won’t move’. It was a response to the forced removals. So you have political statements, but also very intimate desires of people to be seen or remembered, like the scribbling people do in toilets. In high school I spent quite a number of hours in detention, having to sand off the marks that were carved into desks by other students, as a form of punishment.

The wall drawings in chalk only came much later. I had begun to think about the memory of these political slogans and personal messages. How they remain, or don’t. Chalk became the medium in which I could communicate this best, extending into broader ideas around history and memory; the writability of history, writing of history, the erasure of history, the marginalisation of certain histories, and the re-writing of history.

At the same time it is also a material we all have a personal history with, at least those of us over 25 – we strongly associate chalk with education.

And the scratching on the wall becomes an extension of that?

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It becomes more materialised, more sculptural, more permanent in a sense. For my first show at Stevenson in Joburg in 2012, one of the drawings contained the text ‘scratch onto wall’. So I was already toying with the idea back then, but I only materialised it in 2015 for my show at Gasworks in London. And from then it has taken on a life of its own. That is often how I work. I’ll have an idea for many years, but until it feels right I will not materialise the idea. For example, there are works which I’ve been thinking about for more than four years, for which I have yet to find the right moment.

Is instinct what tells you when it’s the right time?

I just feel it – don’t most people? It has to make sense conceptually, materially, etc.

I’m interested in what you’ve just said about the writability of history, its erasures and revisions.

Your videos and performances require scripting and choreography, mirroring that process. Do you see a connection between the two?

I have written scripts before, but none of them have been executed. My performances or videos never have a script.

They exist in my mind. I know what I want to do, but I don’t write them down for two reasons. First, I’m scared if I write it down it becomes fixed. I’d rather have it in my head. I’ll make a sketch instead, as a reminder of what I’m thinking about.

Second, there was a time in which I was spending periods at the Baxter Theatre when I was still in high school. I would wander around in the back rooms. One day I stumbled upon a TV screen which was playing a video tape of The Island by

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Athol Fugard. It was weird, no one was watching it, but I sat there and I watched, alone in this room at the theatre. I’m not exactly sure which version it was, but it was a recording featuring Athol Fugard, Winston Ntshona and John Kani.

The images from that play stayed with me. When I was in art school at Wits I began doing research into it again, and learned that the play was initially not scripted. This had to do with the content, and the collaboration between Fugard, Ntshona and Kani, across the colour line. Had the authorities found a script, it could be used as evidence to ban the play, or worse. So they had to memorise the whole thing. I loved the idea of a play that doesn’t have a script. (Of course it was scripted later, and Kani and Ntshona won a Tony when it played on Broadway.) For our Performa work, there was no script, and we only did a single full rehearsal before we presented it to an audience. I said to Chuma I wished someone could write a script of this now, because I’m curious to see what it would look like. Maybe it’s something I can still do retrospectively.

You habitually draw on a wide range of source materials, from certain Latin American writers to the Fluxus artist Mieko Shiomi, which get filtered through your own grammar and materials. What are you currently looking at?

For a long period of time I was interested in the former Soviet region, because the timeline of their political shift was so similar to ours here in South Africa. In fact, our liberation only happened because of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was interested in the kind of work that was coming out of there: the writers, the curators, how people were dealing

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with certain questions materially and in terms of literature.

Similarly with South America. We share similar histories of colonialism. I wanted to see what has been done before, and learn from how people have dealt with certain questions.

Now, if I see something that resonates, whether conceptually, materially or sonically, I latch onto it and see where it goes.

I leave a lot of things to chance. For example, you mentioned Shiomi. I encountered her work at the time when I was researching the life and death of Nat Nakasa, and the fact that he had fallen to his death. She had made a work about falling.

Of course these two things had nothing to do with each other, but it allowed me to think differently about what I was doing, and therefore I was interested in it. That is a similar process to the one for the third edition of Pumflet, the publication I do with Ilze. It is called Gladiolus, and sets up a conversation between Gladys Thomas and Gladys Mgudlandlu. The first poem Gladys Thomas wrote is called Fall Tomorrow, and then you have a painting by Gladys Mgudlandlu called The Fall, so if you bring in Shiomi there are three kind of ‘Falls’. These are conceptual threads and relationships that will take quite a long time to solidify or understand properly, even for myself.

For now I know that they are related to forced removals, ideas of belonging, home and exile, but where it’s going I really have no idea.

I’m sure there’s a freedom in that, not knowing … Is the process of finding things and seeing how they resonate also how you select the physical materials?

To be honest, I think the materials choose me. One of the questions I always ask is, what do the objects want? Because sometimes it’s not only about what I want, it’s what the thing

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wants. Depending on what the thing is, if it’s metal or wood it desires different things. It goes back to intuition, knowing when the thing is ready or when the time is right for a particular idea. Does a particular idea need a performance?

Does it want a video? Does it want a chalk drawing? Does it want work on paper? I don’t know, does it want a text? Does it want a song? Does it want music? Does it want silence?

The object has a part to play in its own making …

Where does that leave meaning?

Meaning? For me meaning is something that has to do with authority and authorship. Meaning ultimately is about power.

So you don’t prescribe meanings to things?

Of course I do. But I am suspicious of meaning because I’m suspicious of anything concrete. A philosopher, I can’t remember who, gave the example of a rose, which most people associate with beauty. There is already a preconceived idea, or prescribed meaning, that comes with the image of the rose. Now someone comes along who is allergic to roses, in fact who is allergic to roses to such an extent that a rose will kill them. Now, can one still ascribe that meaning to the rose as a sweet thing, as a thing of beauty, as a thing of gentleness?

That is not to say that I don’t work with meaning. I worked with meaning in the performance that we did in New York. We used light to emphasise certain emotions and to communicate certain things, but that’s not to say the objects themselves have the meaning. We ascribe the meaning through the power that we have. Either assumed or given.

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I found a quote by you which goes, ‘History belongs in these three spheres of time, at least in terms of how we generally stratify time between the past, the present and the future. I look at time as something elastic, that the future can be in the present or the past and vice versa.’

What do you want from time and history?

I think the real question is, what do time and history want from me?

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5.

Guy Tillim

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Window onto what is

In 1978, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented an exhibition titled Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960. In the accompanying essay, curator John Szarkowski posits, ‘there is a fundamental dichotomy in contemporary photography between those who think of photography as a means of self-expression and those who think of it as a method of exploration’. He continues, ‘the distance between them is to be measured not in terms of the relative force or originality of their work, but in terms of their conceptions of what a photograph is: is it a mirror, reflecting a portrait of the artist who made it, or a window, through which one might better know the world?’

Forty years later, South African photographer Guy Tillim responds, ‘I try not to navigate anything really apart from putting myself on the streets. How the structures manifest in people’s lives speaks for itself. I try to make a window. One that will be investigated by the most even and neutral gaze, quietly and completely.’

This conversation is an exchange of emails that follows Museum of the Revolution, the artist’s most recent exhibition at Stevenson. It is for this new body of work that he received the 2017 HCB Award presented by the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson. The images are taken across cities in Zimbabwe, Angola, Ghana, Senegal, South Africa, Uganda, Kenya, Gabon, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Tanzania and other countries. The completed series will be seen for the first time in Paris in 2019. At the time of this exchange, Tillim has just returned from shooting the last of the images in Morocco.

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disquiet with the contrived drama of dawn and dusk and their shadows and soft light.

In Museum of the Revolution, Tillim intends opening some windows onto the ‘new sets of aspirations’ taking root across the continent. Improbable connections surface over the course of this discussion. There’s an uncertain distance between romance and realism, choice and circumstance, self-awareness and self-indulgence, the impulse towards playfulness and the gravity of intention towards truth. The ‘window’ perspective on image-making is revealed as both transtemporal and enduring as 40-year-old observations continue to apply to a medium expanding at a rate of well over 65972.2 images per minute (as the latest Instagram stats would have it). Okwui Enwezor describes this moment as an embattlement. In an interview for Recent Histories: Contemporary African Photography, published in 2017, Enwezor says: ‘I think that right now photography, whether it’s in Africa or Europe or elsewhere, is at a turning point – photography is embattled. It’s embattled because it’s overtaken, as a medium; it’s being overtaken by technology and different forms of distribution.’

When asked about this profusion, Tillim responds, ‘Photography is a language after all, and its primitive vocabulary (compared to the literary form) has exploded exponentially, allowing nuances of intention to be divined.’

Whether the proverbial window is tethered to an edifice, a bullet train or some other colossus, Tillim suggests that the pane is still holding, that the act of looking supersedes our available means of sophistry; that confusion is vitality.

‘When you’re not thinking about it,’ he states, ‘you get it for a moment.’

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Sinazo Chiya:

First, congratulations on winning the HCB Award for Museum of the Revolution. The prize states that it is intended for a photographer who has completed a significant body of work ‘close to the documentary approach’. What are your thoughts on realism?

Guy Tillim:

The so-called documentary approach, which I embraced when I started working as a photographer in the 1980s, could be said to reject romanticism in favour of a more truthful side of life.

This is a view that would embrace untidy elements, say, in a scene, elements not necessarily conforming to pictorial ideals, and focus on social and political injustice. I suppose this form could be termed social realism. However, my experience is that unquestioning social realism often fades into a kind of romanticism that undermines its own professed truth.

An interesting point. Is this to say that that form of social realism would unintentionally be a position or narrative dressed as something objective?

Yes. What was convenient and practical to serve the market for news images, say, were clichés, and hot currency for being so.

How would you describe your work now if you feel terms like ‘documentary’ and ‘social realism’ are inaccurate or flawed?

Atoning for past sins! I suppose I’m doing the same thing I’ve always done, only differently. The grand idea now is to allow some scene/someone to speak for itself/herself and not through some triangulation of drama and imposed narrative. It’s all 75

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unknowable ultimately, so why create a simple projection?

It’s a life quest as much as an image quest.

I recall that in your exhibition walkabout you emphasised that you prefer to shoot at midday or when the sun is at its peak. In previous series like Leopold and Mobutu and Petros Village there’s more dramatic lighting, a different kind of feeling. What is the root of this shift?

This relates to the previous question in that in my earlier years as a photographer, I was trying to emulate American and European photojournalists working for big colour magazines, such as National Geographic and Time. I thought that successful colour images were made in the drama of the late or early light, and their black and white counterparts under dark and brooding skies. Very beautiful, but truthful? Later on I began to think not. My disquiet grew because I ended up looking in the same light at disparate situations. Always seeking the same drama that satisfied only these banal notions of beauty in the fluid interplay of light and shadow. It began to seem to me callous, and sometimes even obscene, and I had a reaction to that modus operandi from which I’ve never quite recovered.

That’s amazing. In this series of conversations I’ve also been talking to artists like Dada Khanyisa. He terms his work ‘social commentary’ but he also feels that even when he tells stories that aren’t beautiful, he is compelled to maintain a relationship to beauty, or to have the object be compelling to the eye in some way.

As a photographer, making images from existing life, it would seem that this would inevitably be different.

What is your relationship with beauty now? How are you processing the ‘disquiet’?

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I strive for beauty. Ideas of what represents or embodies beauty change over time. When you’re not thinking about it, you get it for a moment.

What has struck you as beautiful most recently?

Sunrise this morning Someone pointed out that there’s always someone looking at the camera in Museum of the Revolution.

You’ve also mentioned that you prefer to be in plain sight. Why is this?

I have found that in the street, in plain sight and not surprising passers-by, people tend to ignore you even though they may cast a neutral eye in your direction.

Your practice oscillates between portraits, landscapes and city scenes. How do you determine what holds your interest? Do those different genres within photography hold different things for you?

They hold the same thing for me, namely, a kind of introspection, and quest to know, to some extent, the world and one’s place in it. The experience of portraiture, because of pursuing this quest under the gaze of another, has the possibility, for me, to be more intense, and is perhaps the greatest challenge.

Can you tell me more about what you mean regarding portraiture? That introspective yet collaborative kind of personal interaction does sound like a tricky balance to pursue.

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Yes, it’s tricky. To enter into an unstated contract with someone by your gaze alone is extraordinarily powerful. It implies a selfawareness that can be communicated without words and evoke the child or the unmediated in the subject.

Can you explain this a little further? Does it evoke the child or the unmediated in the subject? Is that to say that that kind of evocative self-awareness exists?

To look at someone without prejudice, that is to say, without self-judgment and hence without judgment of them, is a power to which a subject readily acquiesces. They are held, give of themselves. This makes for an interesting portrait.

You came from a journalism background. Do theories and writing by people like Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes around photography and images affect or inform your practice?

Barthes interests me enormously. I love particularly his suggestion of how photography is deeply implicated in the advent of modernism and modernist architecture. I’m sorry to say I have not yet read Walter Benjamin, but you’ve inspired me to do so.

Haha, I’m glad. With this talk of interests and influences, which photographers do you continue to look up to or are you influenced by currently?

David Goldblatt is never far from my waking thoughts.

The Museum of the Revolution series offers a unique way of looking at time on the African continent. It’s almost 78

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a way of physically witnessing ideological shifts, seeing how ideology manifests socially. Do you feel as if it’s given you some insight into the social constructs on the continent?

Museum of the Revolution is so-called because the colonial cities, laid out in grids, and with such grandeur in many parts of Africa, have been a stage for two revolutions. Firstly, the abolition of colonialism itself, and secondly, the transformation of socialist, African nationalist societies into capitalist regimes.

These events have taken place more or less in my lifetime and it has been fascinating to photograph their effects and transitions.

You mentioned that your work has something of an introspective turn, that it’s part of trying to locate oneself in this space. With this series you engage with these big, bureaucratic or hegemonic structures and how these manifest in people’s lives on the ground. How do you navigate these things which can be seen to be at odds?

I try not to navigate anything really apart from putting myself on the streets. How the structures manifest in people’s lives speaks for itself. I try to make a window. One that will be investigated by the most even and neutral gaze, quietly and completely.

A window – that’s a lovely way of looking at it …

You’ve been making multi-image works for quite a while. Leopold and Mobutu had diptychs and triptychs juxtaposing historical and contemporary scenes. From Second Nature onwards, and in this series quite vividly, you do this in a different way; there’s a different kind of seamlessness in the works. What informed this change and how do you make the selections?

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In the current series the instinct to explore the diptychs, triptychs etc, was playful. I enjoyed suggesting a continuous scene when it was not. The juxtaposition is neither necessarily more nor less truthful than a single image or anything else.

When is an image truthful? You said some images have been ‘hot currency’.

I mentioned currency in the context of the news images I used to make. It may sound obtuse but I find images to be most truthful when I’m not sure what is photographed: there’s an absence of hierarchy of elements in the frame. We’ve come back to my window analogy.

In what other ways does playfulness show in your photographs?

I’m not sure that it shows. Sometimes I look at them and find pretentiousness and banality. On good days I notice the little things. I’m in the window.

Are you familiar with Teju Cole and his work? In a recent book he says, ‘It has become hard to stand still, wrapped in the glory of a single image, as the original viewers of old paintings used to do. The flood of images has increased our access to wonders and at the same time lessened our sense of wonder. We live in inescapable surfeit.’ As a photographer in an age of content-farming and Instagram, what do you think of this statement?

There is something in what he says, and yet sometimes I feel we’ve only just begun to experience the wonder. Photography is a language after all, and its primitive vocabulary (compared to 80

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the literary form) has exploded exponentially, allowing nuances of intention to be divined.

You’ve repeated the word ‘quest’ in the course of this conversation. I found a quote where you said, ‘The frame cannot escape the question about what it can’t see and can’t know, but perhaps there’s a place where the question simply ceases to arise’. Is this what is informing your quest?

Yes it is. If, when looking at a photograph, I find myself wondering what lies outside its particular frame, as I often do, I am less than compelled. The same applies to the making of a photograph.

In the same text mentioned above, you said, ‘I couldn’t see everything and be everywhere. I realised that to suggest some kind of truth, it wouldn’t matter particularly where I was, but I’d have to let the place speak through me rather than trying to assign co-ordinates to a piece of puzzle’.

Does that mean you consider yourself a conduit?

I hope to get there one day.

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6.

Mame-Diarra Niang

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6. Mame-Diarra Niang

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The matter of self

Black Hole was the title of Mame-Diarra Niang’s August 2017 residency at Stevenson Johannesburg’s fifth-floor space. For those who know the artist mainly as a photographer, this was an unexpected step – the key materials were sound, light, texture and smell. For a month, Niang created and sustained a sensory interstice in a city of relentless pacing.

Her previous bodies of work are titled Dolorosa, Ethéré, Sahel Gris, At the Wall and Metropolis. While the first is drawing and the second is largely performative, the last three are chapters in a photographic trilogy. Sahel Gris captures a parched and rural landscape – the Encyclopaedia Britannica defines the Sahel as a ‘transitional zone’. At the Wall traces the boundaries and thresholds of urbanised living, and in Metropolis, a hyper-industrialised city is abstracted into bracing turrets of line and colour. Niang’s treatment of terrain is in the service of what she terms the ‘plasticity of territory’. Her works treat place as something personal and intimate. According to John Szarkowski’s dichotomy between ‘mirrors and windows’ (mentioned in this book’s conversation with Guy Tillim), Niang would be a ‘mirror’ artist. The locations the images are taken in have little to do with their import; entire geographic features are repurposed as reflections of the artist’s psyche. Niang states: ‘My duty as a human and as a woman is to tell my story. When I started with my photography I was so embarrassed when people told me it was about Dakar or Johannesburg, because that was not what I was trying to do with it. It’s about what I am.’

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the movements of Niang’s cat. The conversation is multifarious and haphazard, the appropriate form for an artist who cuts through essentialist delineations of thought. In her statement for Recent Histories: Contemporary African Photography and Video Art, she reiterates, ‘As any territory possesses borders, the act of framing becomes a fundamental gesture. As a result, notions of language and representation begin to collapse. In my practice, the visible is not enough, in looking beyond the obvious, my process concentrates strictly on observing and engaging with the matter of self.’

Niang chooses the descriptor of artist, not photographer, because her choice of medium is tangential, not definitive.

Whether she uses moving images, soil or soundscapes, her position is from a commodious solipsism – introspection made communal. Her ‘mirror’ resembles not glass but a stream.

She states: ‘I wanted to paint a picture for everyone, including myself, in which I would feel at ease. An open-ended picture, in which the viewer would have an idea of what is happening without my saying, “That’s the way it is.”’

In Since Time Is Distance in Space, the ongoing video installation of which Black Hole is a chapter, Niang fabricated satellite imagery using soap-foam drying on concrete – among other elements – to communicate a process of simultaneously going outward and inward. She exercises agency through a transposition of self onto the cosmos – further description is imposition. And so, in her own words …

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Sinazo Chiya & Federica Angelucci:

Last year you spent a few weeks on a residency at Stevenson’s fifth-floor space in Johannesburg. How do you look back on that period? From the outside, your video installation – envisaged as a chapter in a larger project titled Since Time Is Distance in Space – seemed like quite a radical shift.

Mame-Diarra Niang:

I try to find the correct language to say what I want to say at any given time. I had been focused on my photography recently, in particular the trilogy of Sahel Gris, At the Wall and Metropolis, but before that I was doing installation and performance. You know I used to make drawings? Maybe the shift was for me to accept that my practice is all these things. For a while that was photography because of the distance it allows. I lost my father, and I went back to Senegal with only my camera. It allowed me to have a conversation between myself and what had happened in my life. It was a protective shell.

With the Black Hole residency, you brought together multiple video screens, sound and scent in an immersive environment. Had you worked with sound before?

I always had a hunger for music, but had never used it in my work. I wasn’t sure how I would do it, using an iPad and music controller, but I had a feeling I could. My work is like a collage of myself. As I work through my past, I come to understand more about myself. That was what I was trying to do with this installation.

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universe and the external world. It is paradoxical as, in Since Time Is Distance in Space, the viewer loses all points of reference, while you try to come to terms with your past, to build a map.

Yes, it’s true. It is a topographical work but instead of mapping landscapes or places I try to map archetypes, with the aim of placing myself within my own history and narrative. Since Time Is Distance in Space does not exist without Metropolis. Metropolis does not exist without At the Wall. At the Wall does not exist without Sahel Gris. The extremes almost touch each other.

The space of Metropolis seems to me less intimate than the space one experiences in the video installation, which feels deeper inside your head.

What if the Black Hole ‘chapter’ was an escape from Metropolis, a way out instead of a way in? Sometimes I am not sure whether we have moved outward or deeper inward.

I was under the impression that we had moved deeper inside; it is an integration of the photographic series on the territory as identity, and plunges fully into abstraction.

I am interested in your idea because it belongs to you, really.

It is your impression, what you experienced. I think I set something in motion and then relinquished control over it; in fact, I might not have set it in motion consciously. My first studies were in theatre, and I wanted to do scenography. I want to build, to put a territory back together – my territory. What would be the doings of this territory, the sound or scent of this territory? I wanted to paint a picture for everyone, including myself, in which I would feel at ease. An open-ended picture, 88

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in which the viewer would have an idea of what is happening without my saying, ‘That’s the way it is.’

How do you see the audience relating to the ‘collage of yourself’, to your territory?

I think we all share a reality. Sometimes we are on our own and sometimes we have to share something; it is a conversation between frames. What is interesting for me is that you add your experience to that moment in my space. You get something from me, and you also add something that I don’t know. For example, when you came, Sinazo, together with Milisuthando Bongela, Kwanele Sosibo and Zaza Hlalethwa from the Mail & Guardian, you were the first visitors I had in that space – we had an interesting conversation, the kind of moment where we let go of things and find ourselves vulnerable. A moment of truth, a moment that allows us to shift something in our minds, our energy. If you remember, I was feeling so low, alone in Johannesburg … but your visit made me understand the importance of what I was doing. It gave me the energy to make the right change, the right move.

I find your notion of territory as opposed to identity very interesting. Territory suggests something that is meant to be walked on or through; there isn’t a singular perspective – you move and change and everything changes around you.

That’s it! The very idea of identity sets one in a single space and does not allow one to renew oneself; it’s as if having an identity and naming it denies you the possibility of changing.

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an identity fixes you in one place, contains you and provides limits … When you move, both physically and metaphorically, you end up being much more than the set of assumptions inherited at the beginning of your journey. What are you?

What is your shape? What is this territory?

Would you describe the way you work as intuitive?

Yes, it’s always intuitive and has always been like that. I don’t force myself, ever. When I think too much about what I’m doing, it becomes more about my ego. I start wanting to become the queen of the world and it doesn’t make sense because I am the queen of my world. That’s why I just need to go with my own creation and not build something in opposition to something else, for example.

I’m curious about how the body has shifted in your work.

Previously, in your photographic work, there would be a small figure and a big environmental context. Now we are seeing an absence of figures or just the environment transformed – it’s very abstract – and then we see closeups of faces moving, the body and motion, taking up the whole frame.

You know, when I made Since Time Is Distance in Space, I understood something in relation to those small characters from At the Wall and Metropolis. For a long time I’d been telling myself, ‘Those characters hold the wall and are framed by the wall.’ Now I’m thinking that in fact I wanted to be seen by those characters. It’s me they are looking at, not the wall; they are asking for my attention. During the shooting of the videos for the installation, I was working on my terrace and there were people doing construction work around; some of them would 90

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see me naked, and I realised that I didn’t care, that I wanted to be seen in this territory, in this continent.

Could we say that for a time you were trying to hide and at some point you came back, you stopped hiding?

Yes, that’s it. I stopped hiding when it became unbearable for me. But I still had the need to be discreet. How to reveal everything about myself and still keep a part secret?

Can you talk about what you had been hiding from?

There was a point where I no longer felt connected with my work … I was in Dakar and I felt so depressed. It was the time of the Dakar biennale in 2016, and the whole art world was in my city. All these people I didn’t want to see or be with were in my space, in my town where I grew up. So I didn’t want to go out, and I started making this work from my rooftop. I just wanted to do something with my body and my anger. I was angry with all these people; you know when you want to go somewhere and rest, and then all these people that you ran away from in Paris and elsewhere in the world start to show up. Right at the end of the world, and you are just like, ‘No, no, no. I need space to rest, I need a space where I can be true and where there’s no question of power or the art market.’ It was like these people were acting on my ego and this was my defence mechanism.

It wasn’t a healthy space to be in.

No. I was living in the house that my father left me, a huge unfinished house with not too much furniture inside. It’s a life that I really love and no one knows that I live like that, with nothing.

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father left me, a lampshade. I started playing with my shadow and that started something. I started feeling like myself.

It’s like your territory, this place that was so intimate to you, was invaded. So you made a new territory inside yourself or inside this environment of yours?

Yeah. There was so much anger because at the previous biennale when I did my performance … I don’t know if you followed the story of what happened with all the homosexual artists who exhibited their works during the biennale in 2014?

Is that when the exhibition on homosexuality at the Raw Material Company got shut down?

Yes. I had some fear about staying in Dakar after that, and moved back to France. I didn’t go back for about two years.

When I returned to Dakar for the first time after this, at the time of the 2016 biennale, it was like I came back at the same moment as when I left, with all this insecurity. For the first time I was scared of people. I don’t know … I just needed to find a new space and present my body like a statement to say that this is my territory. There was a sort of healing I had to go through in my home and within my own personal temple, my body. And indeed this was the last character I needed to bring to the work. It was as if those characters that were there were reminding me that I had to look at myself, that I had to let it out, that I had to take a risk and erase the walls. The walls came down … it was like I was taking shape.

What role do aesthetics play in your work when so much of it is based on healing and your own personal journey?

Where does beauty come in?

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My Parisian style! Hahaha. I don’t know … I really love brutalist architecture, images from NASA – a ‘cold’ aesthetic.

Can you elaborate on your attraction towards images of space, the moon?

There is a documentary called Universe that was made before the lunar landing; its aim was to make the public understand that something could exist without anyone having been there.

How do we recreate an environment through collected data, using images to illustrate a place where no one has ever been?

When the lunar landing happened, the public believed that the moon had to look like it did in the documentary – it was what they expected. I do something similar when I include images from satellites and NASA; I try to prepare the viewer to imagine something not really accessible visually. How can we think about memory, the territory as identity? I offer clues to try to understand, visualise something that is inherently abstract.

I researched satellites and GPS systems and I realised that there is no such a thing as a full picture of Earth: the images of the globe that we have are the result of stitching together square or rectangular images from satellites. When we search for ‘planet Earth’ on Google images, what we get are 3D reconstructions, but we don’t question the specifics of the visual we are looking at. These are examples of how it is possible to suggest that something exists without having real proof of it.

The classic image we see of the planet Jupiter has the same clouds and atmospheric conglomerates in the usual spots – at some point I started questioning whether what we were shown was true or a fabrication. I also questioned what I think I know about historical colonisation and space colonisation: what do I know by direct experience, and what do I know is true because it has been presented to me as such? First-hand, I have only 93

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experienced Earth as flat, while I have been told and shown it is a sphere. How much can I trust what has been shown to me?

I started questioning everything and building an archive of my own inner knowledge.

The conquest of space is something spectacular; my personal conquest is the conquest of my inner world, which shapes my external reality very deeply. When I was a child I was attracted to astronomy; I have always been fascinated by the stars and other phenomena in space that were either unknown or mysterious. I have always related them to myself; the link I see between my inner world and faraway space is that they are both impalpable. The starlight that we see burned millions of years ago and we only perceive it now. When we look at the sky we look at the past; in the same way our inner world is made of our ancestral memory. Our cellular memory projects the past into our present.

Has political work ever appealed to you?

I’m talking about myself and that is political. I’m a statement – I’m mixed, I’m lesbian. My duty as a human and as a woman is to tell my story. When I started with my photography I was so embarrassed when people told me it was about Dakar or Johannesburg, because that was not what I was trying to do with it. It’s about what I am. Someone who was raised by a woman, my mother. I’m much darker than my mother, who is mixed. My grandmother is white. My aunt is Korean and my father is Black. My family made peace and I am making peace.

So this is political, to be all these things and try to collage your life and say, ‘I’m okay with what I am’. Sometimes I’m the oppressor, sometimes I’m the victim, sometimes both.

I’m one with what I am.

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It is a bit of a paradox – the fact that you are a mixed child does not protect you. You are outside; you are a stranger, a foreigner who comes and takes photograph of things that have no historical memory for you but a lot for someone else. How do you explain that you are using this as part of a bigger composition that has nothing to do with actual history?

You know, it is like when you taste a fruit, hmm, this fruit reminds me of an apple, whereas it was actually a kiwi or a kaki. It is like a taste of déjà vu. I experiment with these kinds of déjà vu. You said it: I come from outside, I am mixed; when I am here I am not part of France, and when I am there I don’t belong either. The only place where I can find myself is within myself. That is what I look for in landscapes. When I find my vision, something that puts me at ease, that’s it – I am back on my path. I am not trying to look for someone’s history, I am trying to find my own shape in a space where I will never be welcomed as home.

So when someone says I have to bring a historical point of view, I say: but who said that? It interests you but not me; it is not the purpose of my work. At the same time that person’s point of view is very important in relation to their own journey. And this is what interests me today, to see what the viewer brings to my work. I am interested in what I don’t know, what belongs to you, to your memory and your experience. It is as if I were an architect building the structure and people entering the building will each create their own apartment with their own story in it.

I can’t know what they will bring inside.

In your series Dolorosa you worked with digital collages of 19th-century anatomical drawings.

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I worked on this piece while I was sick; the illness manifested subsequent to a loss and I felt overwhelmed. I was terrified and angry as my body seemed to be rebelling against me. The sequence starts with a digital collage, an anatomical drawing of the heart, which then morphs into other organs. All the drawings I used describe a kind of fear … I needed to face my monsters but they were inaccessible, so I made them somehow visible. The collages are portraits of monsters brought to the surface, in the guise of a map. Another territory, I guess.

There is a word you use, ‘radicant’, that seems very important in understanding your work.

It refers to a plant that is at home wherever it is; it can take root anywhere. It doesn’t have a designated space, a specific land or physical territory like a country or a city. It is a nomadic plant that finds its form in wandering, like herbs that grow in the concrete. For me the work needs to be ‘radicant’ like this.

In this sense, in your work, you travel between Africa and something else. You say there is a part of you that has a European perspective and another part that is African – and Africa is in any case part of the world, one cannot isolate it.

Exactly. When you speak of ‘radicant’, it makes me think of myself when I was little and left France to live in Ivory Coast, without my mother, and then I came back and left again.

Really, I can’t forget that originally I was born in France.

When I arrived on the African photographic scene, people would ask me to position myself in terms of identity. Often I am called Senegalese, but I am not Senegalese! Or at least not only Senegalese. This is why my work is nomadic. I always 96

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try to find my form. One day I will say that I am Senegalese and another day I will say no, I am not that at all. Suddenly I am South African. Because South Africa gave me my shape, because you made me travel to South Africa, and this brought me a new memory that I would identify with. How can I say I come from one space if, for me, being here is always present in what I am?

With all your works, it’s feels like you’re grafting yourself into the environment because there’s something that you want to figure out or explore. Metropolis was about being in Joburg, but changed from how it appears into something very personal.

Yes, because the work is about my experience of Joburg. I’m so in love with Joburg. Every time I’m in that city I take all these forms, these colours … It makes me angry about a lot of things.

I never experienced what you experienced. It broke my heart and that’s why Metropolis has beautiful colours, but feels a bit suffocating. That was my experience, with these huge walls in Johannesburg. I did the work inside cars or buildings because I could not work in the streets.

We have spoken a lot about territory. Which place do you connect with the most?

Where I am. I don’t try to find a space or population or history inside the city. I try to find myself in these territories. So when I did Metropolis, I looked with my own eyes. It’s not a project about fear or apartheid. While I was making the work I was with a friend who was my driver and she was always trying to explain the histories of this building or that, and I always said, ‘Oh no, don’t speak to me about that.’ I had to find my look, my eyes, 97

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how I feel. I started taking some photographs and they were not at all interesting. For a while I was stuck in Braamfontein.

I was scared, you know, and then one day things shifted. That day I took these pictures on Juta Street. And when I saw them I knew from the language of the work that it was my eyes, it was my look, it was my way to see the world, the colours, the angles. It was not about the history, the violence; it was how I see the world and how I see myself inside the city, the country.

I could finally be myself in Johannesburg. Indeed, it is always like that. It is a ‘space odyssey’, but through setting out to discover another territory I am able to discover myself.

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7.

Claudette Schreuders

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The limits of language

Claudette Schreuders’ influences span West African sculptural traditions, Norwegian novelists, American folk music and imagery from medieval England. Reference, homage and resonance are important to her. For the body of work titled Note to Self she translated several notable figures in her pantheon into wooden busts – among them Alice Neel, Balthus, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Bessie Head, Marlene Dumas and Paula Modersohn-Becker.

Having studied at the University of Stellenbosch and then the Michaelis School of Fine Art in the 1990s, her work has its origins in a time when cultural thought embraced a particular form of ‘cross-pollination’. In recent debates, however, cultural custodianship has been re-evaluated in relation to power and privilege, and the result has found that some kinds of borrowing are indiscernible from theft – a shift that, for Schreuders, seems to confirm her inherent tendency to distrust the minefields of discourse.

She remarks, ‘I think there is such a thing as fashion in art and I try not to get caught up in it’. Schreuders is also aware of the implications of silence. The figure central to her most recent exhibition is a sculpture of a woman with her hands clasped behind her back. It is titled The Guilty Bystander.

This brief interview takes place in Schreuders’ home studio, five months after the showing of this body of work at Stevenson Johannesburg. The brevity of this conversation confirms clichés around the failure of language – the reflexive pause that suggests a response is beyond verbal articulation cannot appear on a transcript; likewise the resolute posture that suggests something is a foundational maxim. In later correspondence, looking over a draft of the interview, 101

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Schreuders observes, ‘as soon as a thought is written down I no longer agree with it’. More specific to the South African brand of disorientation, the English language is an unreliable middle ground which we must entrust to mediate the distance between Afrikaans and isiZulu, further amplified by two decades.

In How Do I Live in This Strange Place, Dr Samantha Vice writes: Given the necessary self-vigilance and double thinking imposed by knowledge of whiteliness, being careful in this context does not seem cowardly or disengaged. Rather, the care stems from a recognition of the moral complexities and potential for mistakes, which would entrench the very habits from which one is trying to become disentangled.

This conversation has a timely resonance with this statement – it is a tableau of material and philosophical complexity. The urgency of our context colours the various linguistic gulfs and grounds both omissions and utterances. Schreuders states: ‘I have a fear of being trapped by my own work. I think that trap is not set by the work itself but by the language used to explain it.’

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Sinazo Chiya:

Rory Bester once wrote that ‘each of Claudette Schreuders’ six bodies of work to date encapsulates a phase in the artist’s own life’. Do you agree?

Claudette Schreuders:

Yes, I think that could be true, even though I only really saw it when Rory pointed it out.

How do you understand the process of discussing your work?

Some works are easier to talk about than others, but that is not necessarily an indicator of the success of a work; sometimes you just need distance. I remember in my fourth year at university we had to write an artist’s statement, and I was like, ‘wow that’s hard!’ It was the first time I had to articulate something … I think that having to talk about your art, and actually making it, require very different talents. But if I just speak in simple terms about how the work got here, how it happened – almost like a narrative – then it’s not impossible.

People tend to think that the artist has a conceptual framework laid out, and then the work happens around it, but for you it seems to be a dialogue with yourself in the process of making.

I have a fear of being trapped by my own work. I think that trap is not set by the work itself but by the language used to explain it. What I wrestle with is staying within an extremely limited way of working – I essentially just make sculptures, almost always in wood – and keeping myself free within that.

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You’ve described your practice as very narrow – is the same true for your influences? Do you mostly look at other sculpture?

Not at all; mostly I enjoy looking at painting and drawing.

Ideas come to me more easily when I’m reading literature, fiction. I want to figure out how you can communicate narrative through solid form. Doing English as a subject at university was a blessing, because it added a lot to my ideas about fine art.

It does teach you how to think, studying English ...

Yes, it was a huge learning curve for me because I came from a schooling system where you were not encouraged to think.

Poems are so fleeting. Not something you can really grasp and explain and lay out.

You get to engage with the punctum, that intangible thing that happens …

I love that moment. When you have some small insight.

Is that what your sculptures try to do?

It’s about the freedom to go for the highest thing.

That’s the exciting thing? When it feels a little impossible?

Yes, but I also like it when the work is getting across something really simple, too simple to need an explanation.

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I was speaking to Zander Blom about painting and he said something similar. I think lofty ideals are part of what makes art art.

Yes, and I think it’s kind of hard to go for lofty ideals and still be cool. I made a portrait sculpture of the musician Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, who is someone I listen to a lot. I think I admire him partly because he seems unafraid of seeming pretentious. He seems uninhibited and unafraid – all the pressures that you feel as you make art.

Do you feel inhibited?

No, probably not, I am actually quite impressed with myself for carrying on. It’s been 24 years since I carved my first wooden sculpture.

Is stopping the worst, for you as an artist?

I think I’d be very unhappy.

To make work is an imperative?

If I’m able to spend a productive day in the studio and make some good progress I feel very happy and alive. Unfortunately I can also spend a whole day in the studio and not make much progress, which leaves me feeling anxious.

Something entirely different: how do you relate to the current debates in the South African art world?

I was studying in 1994, and our lecturer Johan Degenaar emphasised cultural cross-pollination; it was seen as something

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very positive and it informed my work. To look at art and culture outside of your own narrow field of reference. The sky was the limit. Now that same thing is called appropriation and has a negative connotation. I think there is such a thing as ‘fashion’ in art and I try not to get caught up in it.

It was a party and now it’s the clean-up. Would you say it’s a dynamic of trying to relearn to occupy a space, when the space has become more fraught?

I think my work is a way of engaging with what is eating up my headspace. You can see that with The Guilty Bystander, though I would not want to reduce the work to that, to fraught whiteness – that would be reductive.

Rory Bester also quotes you as saying, ‘I think what I’m interested in is telling stories. It’s portraiture …’ I feel like that was a very interesting word to use for the work.

How do you suggest an inner life and a personality in an inanimate object? That’s what I tried to do when I started out, what I tried to find the tools for.

Do you feel like you’ve resolved that question? I always feel that your sculptures have an interiority.

Ha! I actually don’t think so much about that anymore.

You’ve changed the wood you use for your work.

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on a dump. This was very fortunate, because a lot of wood types are either too hard or too stringy, full of knots or flaws deep inside, or they completely fall apart after you’ve carved them. Had I started with one of those, chances are I would have thought wood carving was not for me. But now jacaranda trees are no longer sold, because it is an alien species. You can buy cured jacaranda wood in planks but I find it much harder than the raw logs I used to work with.

What are you using now?

Mostly jelutong but also camphor wood, avocado wood, pear, imbuia and limewood.

Jelutong is not a seamless wood – it comes in pieces that require joining. What’s its appeal?

The reason I enjoy jelutong is it enables me to work without power tools and safety equipment; it’s soft enough to use hand tools right from the start, unless I’m working with something very big. At the same time it’s hard enough to take good details and the colour is very close to that of jacaranda. It’s a very consistent wood, with no surprise knots and flaws, and is not prone to cracking. Working in planks also changed the process. Instead of being limited to the dimensions of the log I can build the shape I want and then start to carve. But for a single standing figure I still start with a log-like shape.

You sometimes cast works in bronze – what influenced this decision?

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the skin of the figure – it looks to me like heavy make-up – so together with Jean Tiran, who casts most of my work, I have found a way to create a skin colour I am happy with using patina.

How long does it take you to make a figure?

It depends. I took about six months to make The Guilty Bystander, but she was big. Sometimes there is something in the sculpture that doesn’t work. I have to keep cutting it off and adding new pieces. I did that with her because her arms behind her back kept looking like two broken sausages. You just have to carry on. That’s why it helps to have more than one sculpture going at a time so that if you get stuck you can work on something else.

You just work until it makes sense?

Sometimes I’ll start a few at a time and as soon as I’m stuck with one I’ll work on one of the others. Other times I will work on a single sculpture and stay with it. I usually try and do the opposite of what I’ve just done; if I feel I’ve worked on a single sculpture for a long time, I’ll tell myself that next time I’m going to work on a whole lot of smaller things at the same time. Even thematically – if I feel a sculpture is very political, I like to move more into the personal with my next one.

So each body of work is a reaction to the previous one?

I may feel like I did not convey what I wanted to, so then I know what I want to say next.

Say it differently, say it better?

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Yes, maybe. I would have struggled in today’s art schools, with their very open, conceptual approach. I appreciated the technical foundation of all our projects – we were taught to make moulds, to weld, to cut metal, to carve plaster and build with clay. Only once I had tried all that did I know where my strengths lay. Learning all those techniques as an undergraduate was incredibly enjoyable for me – I loved it and dreaded its end. In Doubling the Point, JM Coetzee says, ‘It is naive to think that writing is a simple two-stage process: first you decide what you want to say, then you say it. On the contrary, as all of us know, you write because you do not know what you want to say.’

I am curious about your lithographs and how they relate to the sculptures.

When I was studying, it did not occur to me that I would sell my work – there were very few professional artists in South Africa as role models, compared to today. I was making these sculptures for myself. I was eager to have something that was going to be mine. That also determined their size – they all had to fit in my space, so that I could be surrounded by them when I was at home. When people wanted to buy them, I felt reluctant to part with them. I got over that though, and selling them also opened up the possibility of making more.

The lithographs are a record of my sculptures, and I’m happy to keep that record instead of all the sculptures – which would now number almost a hundred I think (I’ll have to count).

Faye Hirsch writes of your works that ‘their function of embodying multiple identities and multiple levels of meaning, holds them, like sacred sculptures, slightly aloof from the world, even as they refer to it more or 109

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less directly’. Do you deliberately work towards that sense of the sacred?

When I started out, I found a lot of conversation around art cold and removed and analytical, and a lot of art lends itself to that type of discourse. Mine does not, and I enjoy that it doesn’t.

I admire artists like Jane Alexander, who do not speak about their work. I appreciate that. If you speak about something it becomes banal. On the other hand I love the way Marlene Dumas speaks about her work. It was when I first heard her speaking that I became a fan – she was unstoppable.

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Simphiwe Ndzube

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Being and becoming

A 2016 YouTube video by SABC Education ends with a scene in which Simphiwe Ndzube donates a new artwork to the municipal library of Masiphumelele, an area where he spent his formative years. When the camera pans across the walls of the library, viewers see early works he previously donated; he contextualises the new offering saying, ‘This is the continuation after completing my studies.’ The old works depict moments in an informal settlement. In one, two men read together on an outdoor bench at twilight. In another, a portly woman is seated in a yard, washing clothes.

The new painting resembles Ndzube’s recent works. It is a surreal mixed-media landscape of faceless people dancing. It seems to answer the question of how the Malebolge in Dante’s Inferno might have looked had it included amaPantsula and Swenkas. Serpentine neckties are either poised to strike or complicit in the camaraderie. In isiXhosa, Ndzube says his intention is that the work make people think deeply, that ‘people should think about the dancers and being free. Being free to do anything and wear anything even if there are things chasing you along the way.’ He concludes with an assertion that people should interpret the work as they wish. In his advancement of openness and freedom, this recorded event is totemic of the cogitations that now inform Ndzube’s practice. He has exchanged realism for scenes resistant to easy description.

In the following conversation he outlines why.

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the obscurity of time … but always with a foundation in the physical and socio-political world of those existing in the margins.’ Over the course of this discussion, Ndzube highlights writers, artists and thinkers making work that questions the texture of reality such as Haruki Murakami, Ben Okri, Luigi Serafini, Mawande Ka Zenzile and Credo Mutwa. He continues: ‘I’m slowly building a cosmology of content to explore myths, theosophy, the esoteric, memory and other related mysticisms.’ His words echo those of Albert Camus in his treatise ‘Absurd Creation: Philosophy and Fiction’: ‘In this universe the work of art is then the sole chance of keeping [the artist’s] consciousness and of fixing its adventures. Creating is living doubly…If the world were clear, art would not exist.’

In a preceding chapter, Kemang Wa Lehulere argues for the generative possibilities of unknowing; Ndzube’s emphasis on the limitations of the visible does the same. The artist has moved away from attempts at direct representation in pursuit of metaphysical accuracy. He asserts that his work is now founded on a sensitivity to unmapped epistemologies rather than the comfort of certainty, saying: ‘From well-known philosophers to our completely sidelined grandmothers and grandfathers ekasi, there is all of this vast knowledge. For me as a young person to say I already know the answers would be a disservice to myself – I would not be allowing myself to learn and experience.’

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Sinazo Chiya:

Are you interested in art criticism?

Simphiwe Ndzube:

To me and other artists working today, it doesn’t seem like there is a particular authoritative figure who dictates styles and movements, or what matters and deserves to be taken seriously. It’s testimony to Arthur Danto’s ‘The End of Art’ where he mentions the importance of the viewer bringing their own interpretations and openness, as well as the push for institutions to test, modify and continue to challenge various interpretive methods. I get rather confused thinking of the role of art criticism when contemporary art taste is largely influenced by the market, or perhaps by the taste of the mega-curator or museum inclusion.

Are you invested in how your work is written about?

Would you write someone a letter saying ‘that’s a bad interpretation’?

For now at least, no. I really admire people who can write about art with integrity and insight, and shine light on an artist’s practice.

Would you say that after you left Michaelis you needed to wipe the slate a little bit – clear your mind of all that stuff?

Totally, and I’m glad I’ve had some opportunity to travel outside South Africa to expand my knowledge about how other people approach art-making. There are different kinds of dialogues I’ve been exposed to … Working in Los Angeles I’ve noticed artists’ openness to experiment, collaborate and support each other. In art school I honestly struggled with understanding academic 115

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theoretical materials, but I did and continue to take note of what other artists are consuming intellectually.

Even though you’ve taken your hiatus from theory, are there writers you still find valuable, who’ve stuck with you somehow?

More so than before. Now I’m in total control of my content I’m opening up more to literary influences: Zakes Mda, Ben Okri … I looked at them when I was in school but they seemed tangential, things recommended by friends; it’s only now that I realise those were actually the books that mattered the most.

So now I’m getting back to that kind of material. I just finished Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami.

That’s a beautiful book. You have to read Norwegian Wood as well.

I will.

And besides Murakami?

Magical realism … Credo Mutwa’s short stories in Indaba, My Children, and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I need to revisit. A friend just introduced me to the wonderful and fascinating world of Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus and CG Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

What draws you to magical realism?

My work has naturally opened that avenue in ways that I’m willing to understand and use to my creative advantage.

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I seem to be obsessed with things transitioning and inhabiting multiple dimensions of being and becoming. Magical realism affords me a way to tap into those spiritual connections – between life and death, the obscurity of time, the grotesque and uncanny, but always with a foundation in the physical and socio-political world of those existing in the margins.

What sparked that interest?

Essentially rejecting that I – we – have all the answers.

A rejection of the scientific way of knowing everything, a resistance to the massive imperial centre and its totalising systems.

Mawande Ka Zenzile, who was at Michaelis doing his MFA when I was in undergrad, was a big influence on me, both in terms of pushing myself in the studio and because he always emphasised intuition and the impulse to create. To allow the subconscious to bring images to the front and maybe then interrogate their significance. There is such a deep connection between the spirit world and art-making. Just making art about what’s in the headlines feels inauthentic to me. Reading Paulo Coelho’s classic book, The Alchemist when I was in first year may have been an initial influence. But going even further back, growing up in Black communities that are steeped in spiritual connections, that honour and constantly recall the dead through rituals and dreams, is what comes subconsciously when I make art. At times I feel I connect with very ancient experiences of those who lived before … and memory filtering through things like Gcina Mhlophe’s children’s stories which I grew up listening to on the radio.

You are exchanging socio-political commentary for a more personal, interior understanding of things?

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It’s a very important practice for me, perhaps necessary to not be swayed by the dominant discourses of the time, to create my own unique content and aesthetic that’s personal but universal, fantastic yet macabre and unsettling all at the same time.

Has the distance that you’ve gained since moving to Los Angeles helped you come to grips with everything, or helped you understand things better than if you had still been here, on the ground?

I think maybe it helped me to escape it entirely. I see it with my new work. I have created Bhabharosi, a male-ish figure that is voluptuous, beautiful, ugly, and crippled with legs that have tentacles or rather roots growing within them. His character has influenced many of the recent works. I imagine him belonging to the race of the first people, from the Cradle of Humankind, yet he has worked and lived in the mines. Part of him shares the experiences of the sartorial Swenkas. So he embodies those elements of defiance, of dressing up, yet there is always a tension with something deeper, darker, a sense of being damned in the face of the world.

He dresses up to prove himself or assert himself?

To allow himself a space to self-create, to explore a whole cosmology of what it means to be alive, confused, in search for myths in a world that maybe needs new and very old poetry.

You are creating a mythology?

I’m slowly building a cosmology of content to explore myths, theosophy, memory and other related mysticisms. But it has to 118

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be not too far removed from people’s experience – I need to keep that in mind as I go.

It sounds as if you don’t want the object to be simple and pretty – you need some grit in there, some drama, some mysticism?

Everything, and maybe ultimately arrive at nothing.

So as much as you are conscious of aesthetics, you are following your imagination.

That’s what gets me excited to work every day. It’s about looking, seeing; it’s about how things connect, how they’re placed next to each other, how scale affects your relation to the work, how certain colours make you feel, and how thick layers create … ... their own richness?

They’re almost edible. This is something that paint does. But then there’s also wondering what I’m trying to say, and for the most part I’m really not trying to say anything. I’m just trying to project my imagination onto a canvas. Does it work? Does it not work? Is it finished? Is it not? How does that respond to this?

Conclusions don’t matter?

No. I’m really not interested in meaning. Meaning prejudices objects. From well-known philosophers to our completely sidelined grandmothers and grandfathers ekasi, there is all of this vast knowledge. For me as a young person to say I already know the answers would be a disservice to myself – I would not be allowing myself to learn and experience.

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Just as you cut and stitch and splice all these elements together in your work, you’re doing that in your imagination as well?

Exactly.

Are there other mediums that have engaged your curiosity? I recall seeing an old photographic series of yours.

Yes, photography, video and performance are the mediums I started working with in art school and at some point I will revisit them, when I have a suitable project. Films like The Elephant Man by David Lynch and Dance of Reality, Endless Poetry and The Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky engage a deep side of my curiosity.

Ashraf Jamal has written about you, quoting your words, that ‘the artist’s acts of stitching together seemingly incommensurate worlds, imaginations and things are not only meditative re-enactments of bodily and psychic violence, but “also a form of restoration and recuperation to make the body whole again”’.

The bodies that present themselves in my work are totally in contradiction, incomplete and complete, celebratory but also acknowledging body memory.

What has made the figure such an urgent place of inquiry for you? Your work is very visceral – I’m tempted to use the word somatic. The question arises in part because I read an article that said you saw an accident that altered your view of things. It’s also 120

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because of your attentiveness towards issues around disability – I don’t know of many other artists working with this.

The body has agency; it produces meaning. I’ve adopted the body as my central focus because I want to create images that are empathetic, troubled but also joyous, sharing a universal experience. My first self-motivated project at art school was based on the limitations and prejudices we place on the body, a critique of the ways certain bodies are permitted and denied access in both public and private spaces with a deeper focus on physical limitations. That conversation has evolved much further and perhaps shifted away since then.

It sounds like you don’t want your practice to be pigeonholed into a narrative of Black subjugation, or a branch of decolonial thinking tied to the spotlighting of pain. It sounds like in your work, what’s urgent is how you insert imagination and life. You make the figures live and breathe; things float in midair.

It’s all the stuff that we already have, without being so specific. The materials that I’m drawing from are a decolonial curriculum. Credo Mutwa, Amos Tutuola – they all work within the epistemologies of the south and speak from within the marginal spaces they are from. But I’m against single answers.

Absolutely. Based on what you are telling me, your work sounds very personal. Do you feel like you make the work for an audience?

There is this idea that artists have a particular responsibility …

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Especially from Black artists, people expect certain things. It functions almost as an extension of Black tax.

You have to deal with it some way or the other. You are doing well, so what are you doing for everyone else? Mark Bradford, whose works are selling for millions, has all these amazing projects way beyond the studio, including the space Art + Practice which brings curated contemporary art, dialogues, education and employment opportunity to a predominantly Black community in Leimert Park, Los Angeles. And the late Noah Davis and Karon Davis with the Underground Museum, also in LA, again with an amazing vision that has seen musicians such as Solange and Beyoncé and activists like Maya Angelou giving sessions. Both of these have become important cultural institutions for the Black and Latino communities in LA. I could go on to mention a lot more that artists do as social outreach and public engagement besides making sellable objects.

But at the same time, I think sometimes an artist painting in the studio and allowing people to see their stuff is enough.

Sometimes the role of the artist is just to make beautiful pictures and share them if the world desires to see them.

No one asks, ‘What is the role of bankers in society?’ I think because artists are already so public, so generous, and seen as ‘playing’ instead of getting ‘real’ jobs, we are always expected to do more.

You’ve lived in Los Angeles for a while – do you feel like you are an artist of the diaspora?

I’m still trying to understand what the word really means.

We are all ultimately in a state of transition, here and there.

We don’t belong here.

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How did you get to LA? I spoke to the ancestors and they showed me the way. Truthful jokes aside, I followed a very beautiful girl and really, I had no idea that LA is one of the best places to live and work – if you can take the heat, distance, isolation and traffic, of course.

So, you haven’t lost your sense of home?

I really hope not. But one also needs to leave home and be hit by the world. Maybe one also needs to be in complete isolation to allow imagination and introspection to run their course and get a better idea of one’s self and interests. Life goals.

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9.

Portia Zvavahera

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The path of the heart

This interview with Portia Zvavahera begins in a cafe in Braamfontein, following the opening of her 2017 solo exhibition, Take Me Deeper, a week after Zimbabwe’s emancipation from Robert Mugabe. With this event still orbiting the global news cycle, forming a pressing point of conversation with expatriated Uber drivers, the question inevitably arises of the artist’s thoughts as a resident of the capital city of Harare. She responds with benign indifference. Later, in discussions about symmetries between cultures, she remarks that ‘there’s nothing new under the sun’.

Changes in government, the tabulations of policy and systems managed by bureaucrats are not part of Zvavahera’s ambit. Her frames of reference are the subconscious and ineffable.

From her first solo exhibition with Stevenson, Mavambo Erwendo (Beginning of a Profound Journey), to her most recent, Zvavahera has looked at marriage, birth, isolation and the various forms of love; along the way her typically female figures have transformed into archetypal expressions, shifting from the realm of the personal to the transpersonal to explore the relationship between God and Self.

Zvavahera luxuriates in the ephemeral. Her imagery is founded on her dreams, nature, narratives from the Judeo-Christian Old Testament and indigenous African religions. The ways in which dreams and visions catalyse her paintings is rooted in her relationship with her grandmother. She recalls, ‘When we woke up every day, we would tell each other our dreams. Transferring the energy of my dreams into my paintings has helped me heal myself, and remove the negative energy from my nightmares.’

Zvavahera describes her paintings as prayers. Titles such as Zvakandivinga Muchadenga (Air Spirit Bird), Onaiwo Vana Vangu (Watch over My Kids) and Ndakukurwa (Something Is 127

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Taking Me) suggest her paintings are outpourings from an expanding universe of love and struggle. Regarding these titles she says, ‘As I’m making the paintings I’m thinking about the dream. The dream brings out the title.’ The visible object is the residue of a process that begins inviolably inside her mind.

Despite her visual exuberance and resonant gestures, her works are barometric and intuitive, functioning as registers of her particular devotions.

In Nine Weeks, Meleko Mokgosi remarked, ‘Why painting?

Again this I do not know. One of the enjoyable things about being an artist is that we can produce things that are closely connected to our desires and demands, even though these can never be known in their entirety.’ Mokgosi approaches his heavily researched paintings as studied chapters in a central thesis, and Zvavahera treats hers as prayers – yet the statement of the one is embodied by the other, narrowing the imagined distance between dogged intellectualism and sacrament. In this conversation, Zvavahera traces evolutions in her practice, observing: ‘Now it’s all about the way I see God around me and inside me, and how I want to worship Him. It’s about the way I’m connected to Him. I found that I can’t really talk about somebody else’s faith. I’m mostly looking at my faith now and the problems that I’m facing, and how I can connect to God so that He can also respond to me in the way He wants to respond.’ The beseeching nature of her works is a celebration of unknowable things.

In Seven Days in the Art World, Sarah Thornton concluded that ‘any individual artist can have many nebulous places within them’; after these nine weeks, conversation with Zvavahera signposts the intricacies of these places. Her words suggest that a keenness of subjectivity can transcend the ambitions of critical and material endeavour, as she notes: ‘We have things that we want, but through our hearts. We should follow those things.’

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Sinazo Chiya:

You’ve been on a couple of residencies recently.

How was your experience at the Gasworks in London last year?

Portia Zvavahera:

It was fun. It was challenging. It was experimental. At first I didn’t like the experience, because people kept coming into my studio.

They’d just show up?

Asking questions. I’m not used to that. Somehow thinking about my work limits me. I want to be in my studio and just produce my work. So I learnt the lesson that I have to produce my work and at the same time be able to speak about it.

When I spoke to Claudette Schreuders for this book she said she wasn’t a big fan of doing interviews because the moment she says something or sees her words on paper she ends up changing her mind. In your interview with Netsayi in Bomb Magazine you also said that you’re not a big fan of doing interviews. What makes you push past your reluctance to do this kind of thing?

I realised that I had to face my fears. If I keep quiet people won’t know. So I have to say something – but I cannot say the next thing I want to do otherwise I won’t do it.

You used the word ‘experimental’. Can you tell me more about the experiment of using maize meal in your painting?

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Before I went to London, I had felt stuck in my work. I don’t want to keep doing the same stuff over and over again, I want to do new things. I used my time in London to talk to people, go to galleries, search for new avenues. I found myself talking about textiles, wallpaper designs, India …

How did those conversations translate into your work?

Zimbabwe still produces commercial batik fabrics; they do batik on tablecloths and stuff like that. In London I bought maize meal when I was homesick, and I wanted to make sure that I used it all up. The only way I could do that was to make porridge and make a maize batik – we call it a sadza batik. I also had some designs that I wanted to do on a larger scale, for which the blocks I had been using were too small. The batik was a solution.

Do you plan your paintings with sketches? Drawings?

I do. I record my dreams in sketches.

And those become the paintings?

Indirectly. I try to develop one dream into a number of paintings, because there’s a story that I want to tell. Even if it is a nightmare, I want to paint something that is very positive.

So you turn the negative into a positive thing?

I might paint the actual dream, but I change it somehow. I don’t want to portray the negative aspects of the dreams.

Why dreams?

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My grandmother believed in dreams. When we woke up every day, we would tell each other our dreams. Transferring the energy of my dreams into my paintings has helped me heal myself, and remove the negative energy from my nightmares.

I’m curious about the role gardens play in your work.

What is it about that imagery that you find so inspiring?

In London I would go to the garden every Sunday because I didn’t go to church like I would back home.

So the gardens were your church?

Yes. When you see flowers there smiling, there is God. In your earlier work there was a lot of recognisably Christian iconography – lots of crosses and people who seemed to be worshipping inside churches. Now it seems like a new form of spirituality is coming through that’s more about people worshipping in nature. What does that mean for you in terms of your faith and its movement?

At the time I painted the crosses I was doing some research on certain churches in Zimbabwe. Now it’s all about the way I see God around me and inside me, and how I want to worship Him. It’s about the way I’m connected to Him. I found that I can’t really talk about somebody else’s faith. I’m mostly looking at my faith now and the problems that I’m facing, and how I can connect to God so that He can also respond to me in the way He wants to respond. Now I can feel how protected I am by God, so I’m no longer looking into other people’s ways of connecting.

But when I went to India, it was there. You can’t avoid it.

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That brings us to your residency in Bangalore early this year. What did you connect with there?

Everything – the way they worship, the festivals … it all felt so familiar. Like for example, in Zimbabwe, people used to wear bangles of some sort for rituals, including newborn babies.

Now people are no longer doing it – it’s taboo because people are becoming more Christian and they are sort of hiding these things. But when I went to India, it’s there, you just see it. They are not hiding anything. So it felt like I had gone back to the past when I was in India – it was a very interesting experience.

How has this experience influenced you visually? Are you translating the connection that you perceived into the work you are making?

I was a bit confused by what I saw. When we are in church we’re told it’s taboo to worship idols but in India you see people who are dedicated to that. It seems to me that however you choose to worship, it’s the same. Like with the bangles and everything that is done in India, it’s also there in our culture in Zimbabwe. It’s like all cultures are connected because we come from the same God. How does this relate to the centrality of dreams in your work?

I believe that I have a connection with the Master through sleeping and dreaming. I’m being told my future. It’s best that I trust what I see in my visions. In Zimbabwe there are a lot of false prophets who come to you and say all these crazy things and want money. But then we also sleep, we dream … We have things that we want, but through our hearts. We should follow those things.

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Have you ever noticed a shift in the quality or feeling of your dreams when you are travelling in different places?

In India I stopped dreaming for the whole month. It was so painful. You sleep and you wake up with nothing. In India there was a lot to see, in the churches, everywhere, and maybe my mind was busy digesting the things that I was seeing. The designs I saw in the signs and the colours and everything around me … There was a lot to see, so maybe that’s why I couldn’t dream. I remember just one dream that I had in India. I saw my family suffering and the next morning I had a phone call saying that my brother is not feeling well. That’s the only dream I had and it’s from that that I started to make the paintings.

Is this the dream that influenced the new works with the image or icon of the bull?

Yes. In India they see the bull as a holy cow, as a god. When I see a bull in my dreams, it’s not that at all. It’s spiritual but evil.

I know there’s going to be a battle in the future when I see a bull in my dreams. So there was a lot of confusion for me.

The triptych that you made for the Berlin Biennale was called Hapana Chitsva (All is Ancient). What is the significance of the title in relation to the bull and the battle?

In Zimbabwe we have people who put spirits on bulls, and the bull becomes a god in the family. Whenever they want something they have to worship the bull in order to get it. And in India they are doing the same thing. They do all sorts of things because it’s a god, you know. So for me, looking at it as a whole, it’s like it’s the same everywhere. There’s nothing new under the sun.

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How do you generally choose your titles?

As I’m making the paintings I’m thinking about the dream.

The dream brings out the title.

You alternate between Shona and English. Is that out of choice? Does the painting choose its language?

I’m always thinking in Shona. Even as I am speaking right now, I’m thinking in Shona. The English titles come because people want to understand what I mean. I dream in Shona and everything is Shona.

Do you feel like you were influenced by all the colours and the different fabrics you got to interact with in India?

It was so much fun for me. It was the best place for my work, I think, because every day you are looking at colour. We have colour in Africa, but we no longer wear colours like they do in India. We’re no longer so into designs. I like floral designs … they attract me so much, but I cannot wear a floral dress.

I don’t know why I like flowers so much!

The printmaking technique has long been part of your practice. Are there any other styles or technical influences that you are curious about or things that you’d want to investigate after your time in India?

They were making designs with silk yarns … It would be nice to learn more about that. The fabrics are so unique. We used to have that back home, but people are no longer doing that because there are lots of cheap, disposable products now. I want to bring back what our great-grandmothers used to do.

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Are there other materials or mediums that you are curious about?

Maybe making the batiks on cloth and the prints on cloth, then making something out of it … but the problem is when I say what I want to do, I never do it. In London I saw an exhibition by Louise Bourgeois. It inspired me to make sculptures. When I saw her work, it felt like a premonition of where I would be in 10 years’ time. That’s the feeling I got.

But because I’ve seen it now I don’t want to go there. It has already been done.

But you can always do it in your own way.

I could, but I haven’t found that way yet.

How do you feel about the placing of works in a space – do you enjoy that process?

For my previous exhibition in Cape Town, I Can Feel It in My Eyes, I wanted to make sure everything was hung exactly as I intended. For the more recent show I let the gallery hang it.

Perhaps because it was a more experimental body of work, I was less attached to the overall installation. I just had to come and turn that one painting.

Tell me about that. You moved the orientation from vertical to horizontal?

That painting is called Rebirth. It was too direct when it was vertical. Now that it is horizontal, you need to search for certain things. Gideon, how would you explain it?

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Gideon Gomo:

It’s different looking at a framed painting hanging on a gallery wall. When it was hanging there, Portia got a communication from the painting. I wouldn’t say it was intuition. It was the painting telling her ‘I want to be like this’.

That is beautiful. So do the paintings speak to you?

Is there always a communication between you and the painting?

There is.

GG:

She resolves experiences in her life through paintings.

In the making of the painting?

GG:

Exactly. The making of the painting resolves the problem. When I’m at home, there are times that I won’t go into the studio. The energy there is not resolved. There’s this understanding between Portia and the painting that it doesn’t want me there.

No external forces.

GG:

Not even the kids, or the phone. She is in her own world.

Painting as prayer. Is it the spiritual relationship that grounds you every time?

Every time. Sometimes I feel weak. Those are the times that I hate the most in my life because I don’t dream.

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You feel weak when you don’t dream?

Spiritually weak, fragile.

The work is so grounded in the spiritual world. It makes me wonder about form and technique, about colour palette and gesture and brush stroke. How does that fit into all of this?

I experiment, and then I just continue with the mistakes that I make when I’m working.

So it’s always experimental?

I think I’m always searching for new things. Things that are revealed to me. I don’t think about what colour I’m going to use on the painting. I just end up with a colour on my palette.

So when you want purple, you just want purple?

Yeah. I just want purple.

Does the size of your paintings have a metaphorical or deeper meaning for you? Does the image say it needs a smaller or bigger size, or is it more of a practical choice?

I never started big. I started small, but going back to painting smaller pictures again after discovering the freedom of large paintings feels restrictive. But I don’t really choose. It happens randomly, depending on what I have in my studio.

It’s also intuitive?

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There’s a question I’ve asked some of the other painters in this series: how do you know when a painting is finished?

It calls me. When it says ‘stop’, then I stop.

I know you’ve worked in a container, you’ve worked in a funeral parlor. What’s the studio looking like right now?

It’s our house.

How is it to work at home?

At first I was excited, but now I realise it comes with distraction. I see dishes that need to be done – I have to go and do them. So I’m thinking of looking for another studio somewhere else.

Do you plan on travelling again soon?

Maybe … I have been dreaming a lot since I came back so I need to start working again.

We’re all very excited to see what happens.

Hahaha. I am also.

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BIOGRAPHIES

Zander Blom (born 1982, Pretoria; lives in Cape Town) has held solo exhibitions at the ICA Indian Ocean, Mauritius (2017); Galerie Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf (2017, 2015); and Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah and Atlanta, Georgia (2011-12), in addition to six exhibitions at Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg (2010-18). Recent group shows include Assessing Abstraction, South African National Gallery, Cape Town (2018); Gestalt & Becoming, Feldbusch Wiesner Rudolph, Berlin (2016); Material Matters: New Art from Africa, ICA Indian Ocean, Mauritius (2015); and Handle with Care!, the ninth Ostrale International Exhibition of Contemporary Art, Dresden (2015).

In 2014 Blom won the third JeanFrançois Prat Prize for contemporary art in Paris. He is included in Phaidon’s anthology Vitamin P3: New Perspectives in Painting (2016).

Sinazo Chiya (born 1993, Durban; lives in Cape Town) completed a degree in English Literature and Art History at the University currently known as Rhodes and a Postgraduate Diploma in Journalism and Media Studies at the same school. In 2016 Chiya graduated with an Honours in Curatorship from the University of Cape Town, where she contributed to the Centre for Curating the Archive. She commenced as the social media and press liaison at Stevenson that year. She has written for the publications ArtThrob, Art Africa and Adjective.

Bronwyn Katz (born 1993, Kimberley, lives between Cape Town and Johannesburg) graduated with a BA Fine Art from Michaelis School of Art, UCT, in 2015 and was awarded the Simon Gerson Prize there and a merit prize at the Sasol New Signatures Awards that year. Katz has held three solo exhibitions, most recently A Silent Line, Lives Here at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018). Group exhibitions include Not A Single Story, Nirox Foundation, Johannesburg (2018); Sculpture, ICA Indian Ocean, Mauritius (2018); Tell Freedom, Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort (2018); Le jour qui vient, Galerie des Galeries, Paris (2017); the 12th Dakar Biennale (2016); and The Quiet Violence of Dreams, Stevenson, Johannesburg (2016).

Dada Khanyisa (born 1991, Umzimkhulu, KwaZulu-Natal; lives in Cape Town) completed a BA Fine Art at Michaelis School of Fine Art, UCT, in 2016.

Khanyisa held his first solo exhibition at Stevenson in 2018, and participated in the gallery’s curated exhibitions Both, and (2018) and A Painting Today (2017). A 35-metre mural painting was commissioned for Constitution Hill in Johannesburg in 2017 as a way to give the historic site contemporary appeal.

Khanyisa won the Simon Gerson Prize at UCT in 2016. As a merit winner at the SA Taxi Art Awards in 2015, his work featured on 10 taxis traversing the main roads of South Africa.

Simphiwe Ndzube (born 1990, Hofmeyr, Eastern Cape; lives in Los Angeles) graduated with a BA Fine Art from 141

Biographies

Michaelis School of Fine Art, UCT, in 2015. Solo shows have taken place at CC Foundation, Shanghai (2018), and at galleries in South Africa, Los Angeles and Budapest. His first solo exhibition with Stevenson is set to take place in January 2019. Ndzube has featured in group shows at Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles and Bucharest (2017); South African National Gallery, Cape Town (2016); Greatmore Studios, Cape Town (2016); and the Gordon Institute for Performing & Creative Arts, Cape Town (2015). He has completed residencies at Dalton Warehouse Studios, Los Angeles (2018), and Greatmore Studios, Cape Town (2016). He received the Tollman Award for Visual Art (2016) and the Michaelis and Simon Gerson Prizes (2015) at UCT. Mame-Diarra Niang (born 1982, Lyon, France; lives in Paris) is a self-taught artist. Her first solo show, Sahel Gris, took place at the Institut Franรงais of Dakar in 2013, followed by At the Wall (2014) and Black Hole (2018) at Stevenson Johannesburg. Niang featured in Strange Attractors, a curatorial book project launched at the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018), and is included on the 2018 Sรฃo Paulo Biennial. Recent group exhibitions include the 11th Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2018); 11th Rencontres de Bamako (2017); Recent Histories: New African Photography, The Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm, Germany (2017); the 12th Dakar Biennale (2016); and The Lay of the Land: New Photography from Africa, The Walther Collection Project Space, New York (2015).

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Claudette Schreuders (born 1973, Pretoria, lives in Cape Town) has held five solo exhibitions each at Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg, and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; her museum exhibition The Long Day toured the United States in 2004/5. Notable group shows include Not a Single Story, Nirox Foundation, Johannesburg (2018); Disturbing Innocence, FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2015); Prose/ Re-Prose: Figurative Works Then and Now, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia (2012); Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011); Mami Wata: Arts for water spirits in Africa and its diasporas, Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University and National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (20092011); All the More Real: Portrayals of intimacy and empathy, Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York (2007); and Personal Affects: Power and poetics in contemporary South African art, Museum for African Art and Cathedral of St John the Divine, New York (2004).

Guy Tillim (born 1962, Johannesburg; lives in Vermaaklikheid, Western Cape) has received many awards for his work including the 2004 DaimlerChrysler Award for South African photography, the Leica Oskar Barnack Award in 2005, the first Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography from the Peabody Museum at Harvard University in 2006, and the 2017 HCB Award presented by the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Solo shows have taken place at the Museum of Contemporary Art

9 More Weeks

of Rome; Centre Photographique d’Ile-de-France, Paris; Huis Marseille Museum of Photography, Amsterdam; Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris; Museu Serralves, Porto; FOAM_ Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Oldenburg, Germany, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago. His work was included on Documenta 12 in 2007 and the São Paulo Biennial in 2006, and the touring exhibitions Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life (2012-14) and Africa Remix (2004-7).

Kemang Wa Lehulere (born 1984, Cape Town; lives there) was Deutsche Bank’s Artist of the Year 2017, with a solo exhibition travelling from the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle, Berlin, to MAXXI, Rome, and Pasquart Art Centre, Biel. Other solo shows have taken place at the Art Institute of Chicago (2016) and Gasworks, London (2015). Recently, Wa Lehulere has featured in the 11th Mercosul Biennial (2018); Performa 17, New York (2017); the 15th Istanbul Biennial (2017); and Art/Afrique, le nouvel atelier, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2017).

Wa Lehulere was one of two young artists awarded the 15th Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel in 2013; he won the first International Tiberius Art Award Dresden in 2014, the Standard Bank Young Artist award in 2015 and the fourth Malcolm McLaren Award, presented by Performa, in 2017.

(2017). Her first solo museum show, Under My Skin, took place at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare, in 2010, and she exhibited at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 as part of the exhibition Dudziro: Interrogating the Visions of Religious Beliefs at the Zimbabwean Pavilion. She participated in the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018) and has been included in group exhibitions at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, USA (2017); steirischer herbst festival, Graz, Austria (2016); and the ICA Indian Ocean, Mauritius. She recently completed residencies at 1 Shanti Road Studios, Bangalore, and Gasworks, London. She was the recipient of the 10th Tollman Award for the Visual Arts in 2013, and won the FNB Art Prize in 2014.

Portia Zvavahera (born 1985, Juru, Zimbabwe, lives in Harare) has had five solo exhibitions at Stevenson Cape Town and Johannesburg (2014-17), and one at Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles 143

It is with an immensity of gratitude that I thank Stevenson, the editors and the artists for their patience, commitment to candour and willingness to pursue what is redemptive in discomfort. – Sinazo Chiya

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