Mustafa Maluka: Accented Living (a rough guide)

MUSTAFA MALUKA ACCENTED LIVING (a rough guide)

michael stevenson Hill House De Smidt Street Green Point 8005 PO Box 616 Green Point 8051 Cape Town tel +27 (0)21 4212575 fax +27 (0)21 4212578 info@michaelstevenson.com www.michaelstevenson.com

Occasional harassment 2005 oil and collage on canvas 183 x 133cm

I am not important, my people are 2005 oil on canvas 183 x 133cm

We built this city 2005 oil on canvas 183 x 133cm

I will not be held back 2005 oil on canvas 183 x 133cm

Nigga with an attitude 2005 oil on canvas 183 x 133cm

Real people 2005 oil and collage on canvas 183 x 133cm

Diamonds aren’t forever 2005 oil and collage on canvas 183 x 133cm

They are not my people 2005 oil on canvas 183 x 133cm

They say they don’t know 2005 oil on canvas 183 x 133cm

Is it my fault 2005 oil on canvas 183 x 133cm

It’s too late when we die 2005 oil and collage on canvas 183 x 133cm

I live in a different world to theirs 2005 oil on canvas 183 x 133cm

They pray for my downfall 2005 oil on canvas 183 x 133cm

True story 2005 oil and collage on canvas 183 x 133cm

I will be judged by their yardstick 2005 oil on canvas 183 x 133cm

They look right through me 2005 oil on canvas 183 x 133cm

Don’t believe the hype 2005 oil and collage on canvas 183 x 133cm

Why cry 2005 oil on canvas 183 x 133cm

Keeping the faith 2005 oil and collage on canvas 183 x 133cm

Blind faith 2004 oil on canvas 183 x 133cm

True grit 2004 oil on canvas 183 x 133cm

Unbearable weight 2004 oil on canvas 183 x 133cm

DantĂŠ 2004 oil on canvas 183 x 133cm

www.mustafamaluka.com/accented

Accented Living (a rough guide) 2005 interactive web-based project technical assistance: Maarten Terpstra, Amsterdam

Mustafa Maluka interviewed

by Sophie Perryer

Tell me a bit about your background: where you were born, where you grew up, where you went to school …

I was born in Cape Town, 1976.

A significant year …

Yeah, there’s a story of my mum’s – she had to run from the cops while she was pregnant. But there are millions of those kinds of stories that people can tell. Actually the real funny story is that I was born in a movie theatre.

That’s where it started, in Bishop Lavis on the Cape Flats.

What movie had your mother been watching?

I don’t know, King Kong or something! We moved to Mpumalanga when I was one or two - my father was working for Sasol – then we came back to Cape Town when I was five, and I started school. I went to school in Bishop Lavis and Elsies River.

My parents still live there and I like going back, seeing old friends, standing on the corner listening to stories about things happening. It’s fascinating to hear the stuff that happens in these areas – the funniest and sometimes the saddest things you can imagine. You could shoot a million documentaries there.

After you finished school you went to the Peninsula Technikon and studied graphic design for two years, but you didn’t complete the course.

We didn’t have the money for me to finish the course. I went crazy for the first couple of months after leaving Tech. I had been in a structured environment for two years, I considered myself a good student, and suddenly I didn’t know what to do with myself. I used to watch CNN at night and analyse the language, basically as a way of educating myself.

I latched onto anything I could do to further my education. I used to go to the National Library of South Africa – I read about and researched my own history, the history of Cape Town, the history of slavery, and that stuff informed most of my earlier work.

When did you start making art?

I started making work in about 1994. If I hadn’t done graphic design I wouldn’t have been exposed to art history and that was what made me want to be an artist. Before that, in high school, I was doing graffiti, I was performing as a rapper, I could write, I could draw, but you don’t think of yourself as an artist. Once I was exposed to Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein – Pop art especially – that made me want to be an artist.

What form did your first works take? Did you mix Pop art and graffiti from the beginning?

I think that really early on, in 1994, I was trying to make things that would fit in with what was already being made in South Africa. There were a few artists whose work I liked, which I tried to emulate – such as Tyrone Appollis. He was one of the first people who actually showed an interest in what I was doing. That’s where things started, having interactions with people who were making things.

You write that the internet was a formative influence from about 1995.

There were these cafés you could go to that had free access – they don’t exist any more. It was just a fascinating thing, this place that exists outside of your reality, a virtual space where you can interact with other people, develop networks.

Did you immediately see it as something you could use in your art?

It was a tool – a tool to learn. From the first moment I used the internet I wanted to build a website. My first websites were built using these sites like geocities.com and freeyellow.com – they don’t exist any more but back then you could go there and build a free website and they would host it for free, and it didn’t matter that it had a long URL … It was amazing because within geocities.com there were these different communities, different areas, different streets even, and when I was in the Netherlands I met a few people who lived in the same street that I lived in – I was in Bourbon Street, the arts related area. It doesn’t matter where in the world I go, I always bump into Bourbon Street people. People formed these relationships in cyberspace but they also translated into real-world relationships afterwards. Like the guy who I started the Africanhiphop.com website with, we were talking almost two years before I went to the Netherlands – before I even knew I was going to Holland. When I arrived there we already knew each other.

You held your first solo exhibition in 1997, aged 19, at the Mau-Mau Gallery. How would you describe your work for this show?

In the years before that I went through these different stages, trying to make things that other people in South Africa were making, but by 1996/7 I was starting to go in my own kind of direction. The work I’m doing now and the work I did back then all grows out of the same hip-hop aesthetic.

We had access to American hip-hop magazines then, like The Source; you could get area-specific magazines, say on Bay Area hip-hop – they would ship these magazines here that they couldn’t sell in the States. I’d be online chatting to people and they’d wonder how I knew about Bay Area hip-hop.

When I went to San Francisco I knew what was happening there because I had read about it. I’ve never felt like I was trapped, like I was only here.

I had a global passport because I had access to the net. People assume that because you come from a certain area, you are influenced by certain things only.

That same year you had a residency at the Robben Island Museum.

How did that experience influence your work?

I made work using materials that I found on the island. We were the first people who were allowed onto the island after the change of government.

They had this dumping ground, this junkyard with all these army things – things they used for target practice, helmets, bomb cases … Obviously Robben Island is a heavily charged political environment, and the work that I did there was heavily charged with this history. I wouldn’t do the same kind of residency now, I wouldn’t want to be in that kind of environment and have those kinds of things influence my art. I’m a lot surer about what I’m doing now and where I’m at in the world. I love history, I focus on history, but not in that overtly illustrative kind of way.

In 1998 you held your second solo exhibition, at the AVA, The (unstoppable) rapist. Could you speak a bit about the title and the work?

The title is ‘therapist’, split in half – I was playing on this double meaning, the rapist and therapist – like I was raping and giving therapy at the same time. I was using rape as a metaphor – I was raping history, language, and a few holy cows – looking at language, politics, society and turning it around, giving it to the viewer from a completely different angle, and then somehow offering some kind of therapy as well. Sometimes I’d have two different works hanging next to each other that spoke to each other.

There were lots of paintings but there were also these purely text-based minimalist works.

How were you funding your art-making at this stage?

I had a one-day-a-week job teaching art, at the Joseph Stone community centre in Athlone. I was using a studio there which I paid for by working as their in-house signwriter and backdrop painter. I got the studio and the job teaching kids through my involvement with this organisation called the Cape Flats Art Group.

On your return from Amsterdam in 2004 you said you felt like you had to go to Europe in order for people to recognise your work as being of value.

Looking back now, a possible reason why I wasn’t taken seriously was because I was black and from Cape Town. I’m convinced that if I had been doing the same stuff in Jo’burg, it would have been a completely different story. Cape Town is a really messed-up place in that way, the people in power are slow to transform and when something’s in front of them they can’t see it. Name a young, internationally successful artist who was launched out of Cape Town in the last 10 years … You have to go away and other people have to think you are good before people in Cape Town think that you are worth something.

I suppose I was thought of as just another one of those township guys who wanted to do some art to sell on St George’s Mall. But in 1998, after my show at the AVA, I was included on a couple of group shows – I suppose the AVA was seen as a ‘real’ art world space. Things were starting to happen

here in South Africa. My show had a nice review in the Mail & Guardian.1 I sold one piece, and I felt like, fuck it, I’m going to move to Johannesburg because things seemed to be happening there. I was reading about all these young guys from Jo’burg and I could see that people were really behind these guys, like Robin Rhode was just starting out, Moshekwa Langa had already left … It seemed like if I was in Jo’burg things would happen. I was literally about to move when the Thami Mnyele Foundation in Amsterdam called and offered me a residency four months. They offer a studio space, and a huge apartment by Amsterdam standards, and money – enough money to live on and make work.

You were supposed to make a certain type of work?

How did that become a springboard?

You’re currently a PhD candidate in cultural analysis at the University of Amsterdam, focusing on urban African youth and their relationship with hip-hop culture and technology. How did you go from making art to studying cultural theory?

I was in an environment that was outside of here. I didn’t have to worry about money for materials. I was able to work without any worries for those four months, and I produced a huge body of work. And while I was there interviews were set up with important people in the art scene. I met Marlene Dumas and she came to visit me with the director of De Ateliers – I didn’t know this at the time – and they came back every couple of weeks. And basically the week before I had to leave it was suggested to me that I apply to De Ateliers. I was already intending to apply to the Rijksakademie but everybody I spoke to told me that De Ateliers was the place for painters to go. There are so many Dutch painters who have come from De Ateliers, the best Dutch painters of the past 10 or 20 years, like Marlene Dumas, Toon Verhoef, Robert Zandvliet …

So you ended up going to De Ateliers and getting the equivalent of an MA degree in two years …

I was the only person there who had no formal art school training. I was accepted on the basis of my track record and the strength of the work that I produced in the four months that I had been in Amsterdam. The course is completely practical but there are also regular lectures on contemporary art. You’d have Stan Douglas come in and give a lecture on his work, or Mieke Bal do a talk on theory …The idea behind De Ateliers is that it’s the equivalent of an army boot camp for artists. You are there to develop, they don’t want you to think about selling, no dealers are allowed, no studio visits by dealers, no exhibitions – although I did have an exhibition with Galerie Tanya Rumpff in Haarlem. It’s pretty intense because you have these oncea-week studio visits and you can’t choose who you want to visit your studio.

You’d have big-name artists, critics and theorists coming through. I really had a hard time with one advisor because he initially assumed that I was this spoilt rich kid. He treated me differently to the other students, and it was because I was black – he admitted it.

1 ‘His insights are sharp and incisive, his commentaries astute and knowing. He draws, cunningly, from an array of visual and literary codes, from the discourses of slavery and Black Consciousness, to hip hop and graffiti. What results is a deliberate hybridization and internal cross-referencing among the works.’ Tracy Murinik, ‘Pillaging the spoken word’, Mail & Guardian, 9 July 1998

I was supposed not to make a certain type of work! He was challenging me to think differently, and actually he’s the one member of the permanent staff who really had a lasting influence on me. He would talk to me about subtle things, things no one else would talk to me about because he’s black. He obviously wanted to make sure that I knew what I was doing, and that I wasn’t just bullshitting myself. For me the best part about being at De Ateliers was that I had this time to develop, unhurried, undisturbed – without having to worry about selling.

I had this hunger for more. I am a natural researcher – I have always researched my subjects in depth and a lot of my reading involved social and cultural theory. I found the interdisciplinary approach to the work being conducted at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis to be just what I needed. My PhD supervisor, the Dutch art historian and cultural theorist, Professor Mieke Bal, was one of my advisors at De Ateliers and has been a major influence on my thought, action and judgment with regard to writing and art making.

I remember reading on ArtThrob about an exhibition you held in Amsterdam, titled Hard Living (an ethnomethodological approach).

Yeah, that really showed me how some people think. The show had nothing to do with the Hard Livings gang but that was everybody’s preconception in South Africa. A Dutch critic wrote something about her own preconceived ideas of the show – perhaps this was an African talking about his hard life in the Netherlands? But it’s got nothing to do with me being African. In the Netherlands some people would be disappointed when they saw me because I don’t look ‘African’ enough.

In the Netherlands I also constantly found myself having to explain my surname to other South Africans. They assume I invented the name Maluka, but it comes from Zambia where my great-grandfather came from.

My grandfather is Pastor George Maluka, my father is Dennis Maluka.

We kept our name during the apartheid era even though it meant more discrimination – this is why I hate being challenged on this.

So what was ‘hard living’ a reference to?

It was an experiment involving conflicting cognitions. The word ethnomethodology makes you think of ‘ethno’ but it has nothing to do with ‘ethnography’. It’s a certain approach, taking things that people take for granted and going against that grain, and observing their reactions. So for me using the title was an experiment in itself, and the feedback I got was part of the process. The work was me looking at ‘hard living’ as a concept

and pushing it into angles that people wouldn’t think of. Hard living – what do you think of? Oh, it’s such a hard life? But hard living could just be living to the max, party hard, or a load of other things. My work was framed by this ethnomethodological approach that I had taken to hard living.

The great thing about that show was that everything sold out. It had never happened at De Ateliers before, and that was amazing, and it came at a good time also because I was just finishing at De Ateliers. But still, there was no word from South Africa. I had my work online – since 1995 I’ve always had a website in some form or another – I was emailing ... I was angry and frustrated at that point and I wanted nothing to do with South Africa because I was putting these images online and no one called, no one emailed … It was really frustrating for me and for a while I wasn’t really interested in South Africans; in the Netherlands there was about a year when I wasn’t even hanging with South Africans. I just didn’t want to think about it.

And the titles, such as True grit, Blind faith?

These two titles definitely had something to do with me coming back here.

Blind faith was basically me coming back with the blind faith that it’s going to work. I had nothing planned, I didn’t have a gallery relationship here. I knew some people in the art world and the academic world, but I had nothing set, no one had offered me a teaching job or anything of that nature. So it was just blind faith that brought me here. And true grit is, I suppose, what I hope to have. And that’s what I try to bring across in the image.

Your exhibition at Michael Stevenson is titled Accented living (a rough guide), with ‘accented living’ evoking multiple cultural identities, belonging and not belonging, as well as exile and diaspora. Does the phrase conjure up any specific experiences for you?

So has returning to South Africa turned out better than you expected?

In an interview with a Dutch art historian in 1999, I said that I felt like an immigrant in my own city, because as young people started the process of integration at the end of apartheid, we realised that our city actually belonged to the former oppressor, namely ‘white’ people. They spoke and dressed differently to how we dressed, and they acted and to a large extent still act like the city is their property and we are the newcomers who are infringing on their territory. On leaving South Africa for the first time, I discovered that in the cities I visited, namely London and Amsterdam, young people from ethnic minorities, usually with immigrant parentage, experienced the same feelings I was feeling. I had previously only been exposed to this through rap music.

I wasn’t expecting anything coming back, I just knew I had to be here to do what I wanted to do. I had had enough of the Netherlands for other reasons.

It has been pretty good so far, I can’t complain.

The other day you mentioned that you have Maori ancestors on your mother’s side. You love New York style trainers and clothing. What kind of accents, or cultures, do you identify with most strongly?

Do you feel your work shifting in response to being here?

As Jean Grae has stated, ‘my blood is a million stories’. My mother’s father was Māori from Aotearoa, which the colonialists renamed New Zealand. My people are warriors. I am very proud of my ancestry.

Did you feel more in touch with the music scene in South Africa?

Yeah, but the thing with hip-hop in South Africa, and Cape Town in particular, is that it is this big family. The stars are within reach, there are very few gigantic egos. The people I looked up to in high school are now friends of mine. I was able to interact with people in the hip-hop scene who came to perform in Amsterdam and also through online forums. One of the chapters of my PhD focuses on these ‘virtual communities’.

It hasn’t happened yet – or maybe I can’t see it yet. The reality is that in the Netherlands I had time to just be with myself, I didn’t have to think about what other people wanted from me. I had the opportunity to think only about things I wanted to do, and issues I wanted to raise, and subjects I wanted to work with. I find that in South Africa people like to dictate a lot of the time, it’s like politics wants a certain kind of art or a certain kind of academic … because it’s a new country and they somehow want everybody to be happy all the time, and smile, but it’s not happy and smiley all the time …

You’ve described your portraits as being of iconic, ‘hero’ figures.

You find your initial source material in magazines and translate these images into archetypes …

I transform my source material into imagined people that I would like to look up to. Sometimes they are based on real people, but you can’t really idolise people, because people make mistakes all the time. It’s kind of a way for me to create this ideal world, and also to create images that represent parts of who I want to be, or to communicate a certain type of message …

Rather than ‘New York style’ I’d say I am influenced by hip-hop style generally.

It’s what I grew up with in the same way that my dad’s generation grew up with soul, funk and reggae. As far as identifying with accents goes – it’s a situational thing, dependent on two primary co-ordinates, namely time and space.

If the people in your paintings could speak, what would their accents sound like?

They would sound like me.

MUSTAFA MALUKA Born 1976. Live and works in Cape Town and Amsterdam Graduated from De Ateliers post-graduate art institute, Amsterdam, in 2001. Currently a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam Solo exhibitions 2002 Bad for Your Health/Wrong Colour, www.vmcaa.com/maluka, Virtual Museum of Contemporary African Art 2001 The Realness, Galerie Tanya Rumpff, Haarlem, The Netherlands 2001 Hard Living (an ethnomethodological approach), De Ateliers, Amsterdam 2000 Maluka 2000, De Twee Wezen, Enkhuizen, The Netherlands 1998 The (unstoppable) rapist, Association for Visual Arts, Cape Town 1997 Melanin Millennium, Mau-Mau Gallery, Cape Town Selected group exhibitions 2005 [R][R][F] 2005--->XP, Hilchot Shehenim, Israeli Digital Art Lab, Holon, Israel; Images Festival, Toronto, Canada; BASICS Festival, Salzburg, Austria 2005 South African Art 1840-Now, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town 2004 [R][R][F] 2004 --->XP, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Kalinderu MediaLab, Bucaresti, Romania; and venues in Norway, Thailand, Austria, Croatia, Italy, Germany, Cuba, Armenia, Australia, Argentina, Brazil and the USA 2004 Personal Affects: Power and poetics in contemporary South African art, Museum for African Art and Cathedral of St John the Divine, New York, USA 2004 Outvideo, Ekaterinburg, Russia 2003 Guess Who, Stedelijk Museum Zwolle, Zwolle, The Netherlands 2003 Afrika Hier en Nu, Centrum Beeldende Kust, Emmen, The Netherlands 2002 4th Biennale of the Pan-African Circle of Artists, Lagos, Nigeria.

2002 Crossing Boundaries and Frontiers, Centre Soleil d’Afrique, Bamako, Mali 2002 Interactive Arts Festival.01, Kwang Fong Gallery, California Lutheran University, Los Angeles, USA 2000 (W)interface, Galerie Tanya Rumpff, Haarlem, The Netherlands 2000 Portrait Africa, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany 1999 Staking Claims, The Granary, Cape Town 1999 Project Conflux, Luxembourg, Cape Town and Paris 1999 Postcards from South Africa, Axis Gallery, New York, USA 1999 Oos Wes Tuis Bes, Klein Karoo National Arts Festival, Oudtshoorn 1998 Childhood, UCT Irma Stern Museum, Cape Town 1998 !Xoe site-specific, Ibis Art Centre, Nieu-Bethesda Awards 2004 Tollman Award for the Visual Arts Residencies 2005 Art Omi International Arts Centre, New York 1998 Thami Mnyele Foundation, Amsterdam 1997 Robben Island Museum, Cape Town

Artist’s acknowledgements I would like to thank my family for all their support. Special thanks to Michael Stevenson and all the staff at the gallery.

Catalogue no 15 June 2005 Editor Sophie Perryer Photography Kathy Grundlingh Scanning Tony Meintjes Printing Hansa Reproprint