Reading Room: The Artist Context

Artsy, is an American digital art platform and brokerage based in New York City. Digital art spaces grew in significant prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic – as the arts kept the world in contact during an unprecedented period of prolonged isolation and sickness. The artworld has since continued to undergo transformation with the increase of digital art platforms, that challenge the traditional and conventional art gallery, giving rise to evolved forms of creative expression and more global engagement. Artsy is currently spotlighting Black-owned art galleries for Black History Month and Artyli Gallery, as a 40% black-owned art gallery was selected by Artsy for being a contemporary African art space spotlighting Black African artists. The current digital exhibition is titled ‘Holding Isihawu’, with “isihawu” being the Zulu word for compassion. This current digital exhibition featured on Artsy includes artworks by South African artists Bambo Sibiya, Andrew Ntshabele, Frans Thoka, Asanda Kupa and Fumani Maluleke. The exhibition presents questions concerning what it means to be decent during poignantly indecent times and how this can be relayed through the arts. It is through this exhibition, that Artsy and Artyli have collaborated to do what renowned South African art critic and cultural theorist Ashraf Jamal describes as the role of Africa today…’to give the world a human face’.

Bambo Sibiya creates declamatory and alluring works that reveals more than what the immediate gaze garners. Sibiya has explored multiple thematic concerns, however his most seminal works are his depictions of the gendered diversity of the Black African experience, most notably, his centralisation of Black women, as the epitome of beauty, fashion, culture and as the holders of the home and the community. Sibiya, does not necessarily reinforce the trope of the strong Black women, but certainly gifts us with artworks that embody the protective and revolutionary spirit of the South African chant, “wathint abafazi, wathint imbokodo” which translates to “you strike the women, you strike the rock.” While Sibiya’s works are commemorative and empowering, they are never illustrative, rather, the persuasiveness of Jacques-Louis David’s paintings come to mind – a carrying of rhetorical force.

Andrew Ntshabele is known for his motif – soulful depictions of mothers and children, painted over collaged backgrounds seeped in African history. While history hurts, as the American cultural analyst, Fredric Jameson reminds us, its pain can also be overcome. In Ntshabele’s artworks the joy of children are the blessing and the inspiration. Here the Black children are seen. Buoyancy is the striking energy, the subtle interplay of sepia and rich colour, earthiness and splendour. Given the sentimentality that typically informs how children are seen, Ntshabele asks us to weigh innocence and growth, to maintain purity despite ruin. Given that in many of the paintings the women and children are seen from behind – as though removed and separate – suggests that the painter wants us to be privy to worlds beyond our ken. Intimacy yet distance is the means through which the paintings ensure their enduring pleasure.

Frans Thoka implicitly addresses the disenfranchisement and enslavement of South Africa’s Black majority under colonialism and apartheid. For Thoka, the role of art is to serve as a reminder of this historical betrayal, but also, to do so through understatement. The monochrome colour scheme used in the artworks of Frans Thoka, shifts between grey, black and white, and most recently hues of brown have been incorporated, is commonly used in South African resistance art. Frans Thoka uses variations of blankets – notably the prison, the migrant and the Basotho blanket as an inspirational material, to drive his artistic message which sheds light on conversations surrounding culture and history, that have shaped Black pain and oppressive systems. Thoka’s main theme is rooted in the memories of the land, such as those forcibly removed, alongside those who have been silently buried within it, remaining ungrieved. What we then encounter are Thoka’s creations of mixed media landscapes that tell an implied story of dispossession, viscerally connected to suppressed pain, yet ultimately exalted.

Fumani Maluleke depicts the duality of African life. At first, Maluleke literally expresses African heritage and rural living through the medium of grass mats on which undisturbed natural scenes of green and brown hues of Earth and blue skies are painted. There is a literal element of specific spatiality featured in the artworks of Maluleke that are linked to childhood memory and an upbringing not overcome by the rapidity of urbanisation. Maluleke’s artworks have a still impact that encourages thoughts of communal living with a slower pace and greater connection to the environment. Maluleke additionally dabbles in figurative paintings that capture traditional ceremony and ritual rooted in African townships and their moments of vibrancy and celebration.

Asanda  Kupa’s impasto-laden paintings merge abstraction and figuration, layering earth-toned textures with human forms. His interplay of light and dark elevates social narratives of marginalization, creating deeply introspective works that balance historical context with raw self-expression.

In closing, upon reflection, it appears that collectively, the artworks of Bambo Sibiya, Andrew Ntshabele, Frans Thoka, Asanda Kupa and Fumani Maluleke, offer dual reflections of Black African life and how African contemporary art advocates for greater humanity amidst uncertain times, because if understanding matters, it can only be achieved through love, through compassion.

A grey skip crammed with off-cuts of 100’s of meters of grey blanket material sourced from Aranda occupies the center. A bolt leans against the wall which is lined with artworks at various stages of completion. The overall impact is emphatically monochromatic, though quiet moments of colour – deep blue, earthy green, hessian the colour of wheat – make their entrance. Grey, however, is the defining colour, or rather black, its monochromatic source.

The defining colour, or non-colour, in South African resistance art, monochrome, black on white, signals the didactic and graphic, an expression that is narrow or narrowing, preoccupied with a precise interrelation of form and content – ‘statement art’. This, however, is too simplistic a view, for resistance art – art against an oppressively racist and unequal apartheid system – was never that reductive. Urgent and pragmatic, true, but the illumination of black consciousness never supposed a rallying ideology alone. In I write what I like, Steve Bantu Biko sums up the complexity of the struggle: ‘The first step … is to make the black man come to himself, to pump back life into his empty shell; to infuse him with pride and dignity, to remind him of his complicity in the crime of allowing himself to be misused and therefore letting evil reign supreme in the country of his birth. This is what we mean by an in-ward looking process. This is the definition of “Black Consciousness”’.

Murdered on September 12, 1977, Biko’s legacy lives on in the art of Frans Thoka. Its function – if art can ever be reduced to its aim or intention – is to work through grief, acknowledge on-going suffering, and, in-and-through the making of art, perform an exorcism. If the ‘miner’ or ‘prison’ blanket is Thoka’s defining trope, it is because it carries the burden of Black pain, and its revelation. But it is not only the symbolic power of the miner’s blanket that matters but also its uneasy consolation – the white-striped grey blanket conceals the sleeper as the land conceals historical pain.

As the South African Nobel laureate, J.M. Coetzee, reminds us in Age of Iron, the Black dead continue to groan their woes beneath ‘the skin of the earth’. There remains the urgent need for a cleansing of that vision, or, after African tradition, of putting medicine into the grave – a way of telling a story through words and paint and dance of a land reborn, so that ‘each time one of us touches the soil … we feel a sense of personal renewal’. These last words are by Nelson Mandela, from his 1994 inaugural speech, one which remains a great promise deferred in what is none other than a phantom democracy.

Titled Ba ile Kaae / A Way to Reconcile – Chapter 2   Thoka’s solo show at Artyli in Johannesburg – followed pell-mell by a group show at Scope in Miami – acknowledges the land as a source of pain and hope. His art, however, is not a morbid retention of suffering. Rather, it advances through the embrace of pain, towards reconciliation. In this self-congratulatory hour in which Black portraiture reigns, Thoka reminds us that change is never simple, that Black life, after Biko, remains to be invigorated, transfigured, rendered inspirational.

As to how Thoka practices this advocacy? He does so quietly, softly, through tones of grey, layered textures of black oil paint, stitched and glued collage, the effect of which is silhouetted and intrinsically flat. If depth of field is secondary in Thoka’s collaged blanket-works – while primary in his drawings on Fabriano and hand-made paper – it is because the artist’s approach is fundamentally abstract – Thoka elicits emotion. His artworks, like sonar, evoke or sound suppressed despair and yearning. For what Thoka can never forget is the catastrophic consequence of the Natives Land Act of 1913, in which, under British rule, 90% of the land was given to a white minority, a calculatedly devastating legislation that left South Africa’s Black majority landless.

In her collection of poems, Mine Mine Mine, Uhuru Portia Phalafala sums up the impact of this brutal and cruel legislation which resulted in ‘Social death, communal death, familial death / ambiguous loss … the loss of fatherhood when you had children / the loss of manhood when you were infantilized and called boy / the absence of your divine humanity in your ancestral land’. In Thoka’s art this psychic disfigurement runs deep – it is never graphically represented. Rather, by operating elliptically and inferentially, Thoka returns us to an ancestral land that remains benighted. Over a century has passed since the Natives Land Act, and still land redistribution, restitution and reconciliation, remain deferred. Nevertheless, for Thoka ‘land is the observer of truth’, its mute witness.

Raised in Northern Limpopo, by his parents in the township of Marapong and his maternal grandmother in the rural village of Ga-Maja, Thoka understood both the tension of a congested disenfranchised community and the solemn solace of wide-open spaces. He speaks with great relish of the illicit pleasure of ‘crossing fences and travelling through bush’, of his passion for indigenous plant-life – cacti, aloe, acacia – of ancient burials beneath enduring trees and secret pacts – his a childhood that has endured and shaped the nature of his art fundamentally.

If Gustave Courbet, in his painting Burial at Ornans (1849), sets a commemorative stage, the rural community of varying social stature arranged about a vacant black hole at the centre, then Frans Thoka, unceremoniously, conjures an erased, unnamed and nameless history – an invisible truth. We discuss a cut-out elongated black shape with a rounded tip. A coffin, I ask. Thoka smiles. An entrance to a cave perhaps, he says, or, the silhouette of a cactus or gravestone.

A deep melancholy pervades Thoka’s art. And yet, it is never cloying. While historical ‘trauma’ is understood as indelible, it is carried along with precarious grace. This counterpoint informs the weight and distribution of his monochromatic works, which elegantly balances what is hidden with what is germinal. Ovoid seed-like forms are cut-out, the tonal dance of black and white assume a sonority – the earth might be said to ‘sing’, for the solemn earth is choral too, a song of songs.

Dressed in charcoal overalls, blue and steel fabric scissors in hand, illumined by a low grey light pouring thickly through a bank of industrial windows, Frans Thoka is the youthful embodiment of an ethical complexity. Unmoved by any triumphal zealotry, firmly focused on human paradox, snagged between tragedy and hope, he has chosen to gift us a dilemma. How do we move forward? How do we reconcile what remains irreconcilable?

That said, there has been another human presence in the studio throughout – Frans Thoka’s little son, Lesedi. In between discussions about art, Lesedi and I have been pulling faces. I take a photograph and find him with eyes agog, joyous, hearty … pure.     

It is unsurprising that the curatorial vision veers towards abstraction, and finds the figurative inside of it. In his manifesto on abstraction, Jerry Saltz discovers an enchanted realm, art as a visionary tool – the best ‘ever invented by human beings to imagine, decipher, and depict the world’. For ‘abstraction not only explores consciousness – it changes it’. This is because abstraction, or art more generally, is not as objectifiable as we would like to think. Rather, art ‘exists in the interstices between the ideal and the real’, between projection and sensation. This is because, above all else, it is a sensuous expression, no matter how chilling, how warm. What one connects with when one listen, tracks, navigates, or inhabits an artwork is ourselves. Art is elemental, it is earth, water, sky. It is we who become a divining rod.       

Talia Goldsmith’s series ‘Singing Roots’ is a love-song to listening and to making. Inspired by memory, which is none other than instinct, she notes, on completing a sculpture, that it is she who was now embraced ‘in their harmony’. The making of art completes one, it momentarily makes one whole again. It was then that she realized that her grandmother’s song had accompanied her throughout the creative process – ‘Each sculpture in tune with its internal voice. Each sculpture a singing root. Each sculpture bearing witness that I did listen’.

Another sculptor, Robert Wagener, too finds solace in the process of making his ceramic forms which, for him, evoke ‘the volcanic origins of the earth itself’. It is the grounded nature of Earth that is the artist’s creative forge. His thickly stratified forms speak of a ‘deep time’ which, for Robert Macfarlane, evokes the rich density of existence. Clay, made of earth and water, is the most primal source of human creation – a reminder that we too are made of the same matter – for the earth’s cycle is ‘dynamic’. ‘Mineral becomes animal becomes rock; rock that will in time – in deep time – eventually supply the calcium carbonate out of which new organisms will build their bodies, thereby re-nourishing the same cycle into being again’. Matter is never inanimate. Never truly silent.

If art requires a listening ear and a sonorous heart, it is because it is life. Or, as the sculptor Louis Bourgeois eloquently phrases it – ‘Art, no less than wisdom, waits on life’. Art exists because we are alive. Art exists in and through human life through all eternity. It is this synergy that is the core of Toni-Ann Ballenden’s relief works. Almost geological in the impression they yield, seemingly akin to fossilized remains, they echo Macfarlane’s notion of deep time. The earth is a gestating secret which those, who are able, can reveal to us. Ballenden is such an artist. A conjurer, a seer, she unlocks and unriddles, then plunges us back into an enigma. This is because the world’s wonder can never be wholly revealed. Her art is a mantra, it is talismanic. As such it requires only that we share a mystery. Trace elements abound … gnomic residue….

Raja Oshi shares this elemental preoccupation. Like Goldsmith, Wagener, and Ballenden, Oshi is drawn to earthen tonalities, earthen mysteries. Her bodies are shadows on a cave wall, her geometry is ancient. In joining the human and abstract realms – in reminding us that they are indissoluble – Oshi returns us to a humanity that long predates the eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideal, the self-fulfilling fantasy of rationality, power, and control. Instead, we are returned to more durable intimacies, to an ancient order, an ancient love. As the Greek philosopher, Pythagoras, reminds us – ‘Geometry is knowledge of the eternally existent. Number is the within of all things. There is geometry in the humming of the strings. Time is the soul of this world’.

Once again, we return to whispers in matter – the geometry of sound … the soul that lies inside of things. ‘Souls are mixed with things; things with souls’, the anthropologist, Marcel Mauss, reminds us in The Gift. This is because of the sacramental nature of life, how we honour our lives and the lives of others through creation. It is not vain for Wagener to conceive of a ‘successful’ sculpture startling the viewer, to wish that his creation ‘draws them in and ultimately never lets go’. For despite the transitory nature of life, and the longed-for eternality of things, the hope for the endurance of the things we call art, through love, is an all-too-human goal.

Like Raja Oshi, Daniel Chimurure also conceives of art as an incarnation and a ghosting – as a trace element. Toni-Ann Ballenden also shares this perspective, though hers is more primordial. Chimurure’s ghost-world is more immediately present. A combine of raw collage and paint, the world Chimurure evokes is as abstract as it is suggestively figurative. The works are illumined yet not, despite the peculiar presence of an abnormally large light fitting or globe. Once again, we are returned to Plato’s shadowy figures reflected on a cave wall, though in Chimurure’s case, unlike Oshi’s, there is no sacramental sustaining union. Desolation creeps in … isolation too. We are perhaps caught in the pathos of loss. Is it true, as Kurt Cobain remarked, that ‘all alone is all we are’? Or is Chimurure not also helping us to find companionship in our loneliness, or aloneness? Is love the great and most enduring whisper?  

Hussein Salim and Lynette van Tonder, by way of comparison, share a passion for colour – though here we should acknowledge colour’s tentative presence in Chimurure’s art. In Van Tonder’s works the delineation, however, is much stronger, the artist inviting us into boldly rendered cartographies in which people and places – being and space – are enmeshed. Density is the key to Van Tonder’s creative expression. Sometimes that density is becalmed, on other occasions it’s a maelstrom. The mood-shifts are vital. For her, questing is the driving force – be it a quest for self or a quest for community. That this occurs inside a ‘grid’ is a reminder that chaos requires order, that error requires grace, and that Van Tonder’s art, no matter how turbulent, requires a ‘course correction’.

Are artists the mapmakers of the soul? Are they our guides into higher and nether worlds? Do we long to be taken on unbidden journeys? Is that why art – especially art that is not easily decipherable – our greatest elixir? Why else would it draw us so deeply inward, before expelling us? Why would it sound its siren song, whisper its enchantments? Perhaps because, as ‘the greatest visionary tools ever invented by human beings’ it allows us ‘to imagine, decipher, and depict the world’ – to read it as a scroll, some cypher, some uniquely compelling riddle. Therefore, if this exhibition matters, it is because it allows us to enter the portal of our choice, for in life, if we are not beckoned, we fear that we do not exist.

Hussein Salim captures the pathos built into the creation of art. ‘For me, art not only evokes memories and contemplation of the loss of home but it also encounters the present and shapes the future’. It is the entire creative arc that Salim evoke. If loss is inescapable, so is yearning. Nothing truly dies, all of life is regenerative. This is Robert Macfarlane’s point in his book, Underland, and it is also the vital point expressed by every artist in this exhibition. Salim’s expression thereof is eloquently subtle, even quiet. We enter gentle worlds in which light and shade dance about, in which worlds hover as much as they recede. We are buoyed, held aloft, carried. At no point are we ever lost in a painting by Salim. Unlike Van Tonder, he navigates us through the world without a discernible grid. We travel blind … intuitively. Though this core orientation, this means of moving through the world, is also the lesson expressed by all the artists. Some may need a more organized system, others not, but all, in their different ways, invite us kindly, gently, into realms ultimately trackless, with no finite spoor. We need some light to carry us along … some inner light, some thrumming soul, some fathomless longing.     

There are innumerable reasons for this, most notably colonization and apartheid, two related systems of oppression founded on the enslavement and bondage of black life and, subsequently, the devastation of family, community, custom and tradition. The subsequent alienation proved not only materially destructive, but psychically too. The root of abuse, by men of women and children, is deeply connected to disempowerment and rootlessness. However, to solely assign blame to the destroyed black man is to miss the mark. The Sharpeville Massacre of 1960, in whichsixty-nine people were murdered, including eight women and ten children, was designed to quell protest against the passbook or ‘dompas’ – the most despised symbol of apartheid. Abuse, therefore, is complex. But it is its endemic nature, its perverse normativity, that remains concerning thirty years after the inauguration of South Africa’s democracy. The cycle of light and darkness, sentiment and hatred, prevails. It has become monstrously natural.

In the same year, in reaction to the Sharpeville Massacre, Ingrid Jonker penned the poem which Nelson Mandela would read in his inaugural speech. It is a poem about freedom from enslavement: ‘ The child peeps through the windows of houses and into the hearts of mothers the child who just wanted to play in the sun at Nyanga is everywhere the child who became a man treks through all Africa the child who became a giant travels through the whole world Without a pass.

If utopian, Jonker’s vision remains just. All those who have been oppressed must be freed, no matter the perversity and damage that would wish it otherwise. It is this principle that runs through the paintings by Andrew Ntshabele. A deeply spiritual humanist – a painting begins with a prayer – Ntshabele’s work is devotional. His visions of mothers and children are observed at a distance, at play, in repose, in joy and in rest. As such, the paintings are consolatory – their purpose is to ease the soul. Caught between sepia and bright colour, they are both earthen and ordinarily ceremonial. And it is pointedly, and poignantly, their ordinariness that matters. Ntshabele is unconcerned by the rictus of extremes that holds the country in its thrall, the pornographic spectacle of pain, or the morbid entitlement that comes with the extortion of an historical burden. It is not justice Ntshabele seeks but peace and atonement. This, for the artist, is achieved counter-intuitively, by refusing to fall prey to systemic abuse.

Three barefoot children walk away from the viewer, arm in arm. Four young girls, again turned away from the viewer, perform a dance with arms upheld. Young children race from a scene in some excited anticipation. Children sit cross-legged in a circle, rapt in deep mutual attention. Mothers sit in a separate gathering from the faintly outlined men in the near distance. These are not paintings which force a reckoning. Ntshabele’s deliberate refusal to produce an engaging sightline, in which the viewer meets the eyes of the painter’s subject, resists complicity. ‘Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant’, Henry David Thoreau asked. ‘We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages’. It is the wonder on mutual insight that compels Thoreau. Not so Ntshabele. If his worlds are seen askance, it is because a deeper wonder in humanity is possible through vicarious observation. Given the historical objectification of the black body – black life – all the more does the artist seek the sanctity of the prosaic and unremarkable. In this regard, Ntshabele concurs with the view of the celebrated cultural thinker, Njabulo Ndebele. ‘The ordinary day-to-day lives of people should be the direct focus of political interest because they constitute the very content of the struggle, for the struggle involves people not as abstractions. If it is a new society we seek to bring about in South Africa then that newness will be based on a direct concern with the way people actually live’. Ndebele’s view underscores Ntshabele’s vision. For both the painter and writer, it is the miraculous nature of the everyday that is the greater boon.

Ntshabele’s paintings, however, are not merely documentary records of everyday life. The naturalistic deportment of his mothers and children is certainly the key, but their location and framing signals a parallel conversation. Against a wall, just beyond a gathering of children, we see a dense collage of layered newsprint and images. A dense colonial-historical timeline? A counterview to the innocent grouping at the fore? ‘History hurts’, Frederic Jameson remarked. But what is the nature of Ntshabele’s relationship with history? Is it ever-present? And if so, is there in fact no redemption? Is black life forever shadowed by its oppressor? Given that the mothers are seated on a mat of shredded newsprint – the words ‘racism’ and ‘flames’ glaringly in our sightline – supposes that the vaunted quiet and calm the figures emit, is also transected by a violent history. Is there no escape? Is innocence an illusion? Or is innocence not all the more vital despite the reality of embedded pain?

How one reconciles this tension in Ntshabele’s collaged paintings is critical – it will determine their reception and its outcome. What cannot be ignored is the complexity of the fate of mothers and children. To idealise someone is also to diminish them. The sacred and the profane are inextricable. However, what matters in this fathomless realm of wrong is how and why one prevails – the goodness that remains, the beauty too. Andrew Ntshabele is no sentimentalist. However, like the celebrated poet, Ben Okri, he understands the enduring power of prayer and sacrament. In the poem he penned in honour of Martin Luther King’s famous speech – ‘Children of the Dream’ – Okri writes:

They want the earth and the stars
And the beautiful heavens.
They want to be free
And they want the possibilities
That freedom brings. And also
Freedom’s weight and dark side.
They want to love who they want.
They do not want to be defined.
They do not want to be limited.
They do not want to beg for
Their humanity, or the right to be
Creative, or different, or unexpected
Or wild, or surprising, or defying
Of boundaries. They do not want Condescension, or assumptions.
They want to rebel, even against Themselves. They want to celebrate,
Even that which didn’t celebrate them.

The natural motif central to Mandela’s speech was by no means accidental, for what the great leader sought to foreground was the inextricability of nature and humankind, place and citizenry, and the seamless interface of the so-called ‘alien’ jacaranda and indigenous mimosa. ‘That spiritual and physical oneness we all share with this common homeland explains the depth of the pain we all carried in our hearts as we saw our country tear itself apart in a terrible conflict and as we saw it spurned, outlawed and isolated by the peoples of the world, precisely because it has become the universal base of the pernicious ideology and practice of racism and racial oppression’.

Fast forward thirty years and, today, we find ourselves still striving to overcome a pernicious ideology that informs the instability and turbulence of the current moment. But it cannot be ignored that, finally, we are revisiting Mandela’s great ethos in a bid to build a government of national unity, a reconciled and wholly inclusive citizenry, a new era as wondrous as greening grass and blooming flowers, as joined as the jacaranda and mimosa. It is in this greater unifying spirit that Karen Cullinan, curator and director of Artyli Gallery in Sandton, Johannesburg, presented a group show, titled Soil, in which the earth we all occupy, through which we are natally and historically shaped, proved the decisive connective tissue. For as Mandela optimistically reminded us, when we touch ‘the soil of this land, we feel a sense of personal renewal’.

While this generative power is certainly the core spirit of the group show, we cannot ignore the toll of history and burden of pain which informed the art of Frans Thoka in particular, because for him the rind of earth on which we stand also conceals a deeper loss and hardship – the historical fact that in 1913, under the Natives Land Act, 90% of the land was handed to a white minority, and the black majority left landless, displaced, without the ability to truly root themselves. The traumatic consequence of this loss remains trenchant, and, in a conversation with the artist, it could not be suppressed. For if the land is a key motif in his paintings of cacti, irrigated earth, gravesites, scarified patterns that conjure wormholes and terrestrial rupture, what cannot be ignored is the surface on which Thoka’s unsettling pastoral scenes are cut and threaded – namely, Basotho or ‘prison’ blankets in grey with white stripes. An archetypal and generic material, a cipher for warmth and rest, but also for displacement and migrancy, the blanket is a Janus-faced emblem-medium-tool. While the affect of Thoka’s paintings is easeful, the grey palette quietly consoling, the artist nevertheless remains insistent regarding the continued unrest which an artwork, formed from a definitional trope of bondage, conceals or suppresses.

If Thoka’s vision is burdened by pain, if, for him, a graveyard is a sacred place to which one returns, through which one protects oneself, for Asanda Kupa, say, it is not a place as despairing. His thickly painted pastoral scenes, in which black community is the central seam, express a ‘subterranean solidarity’, some hidden connectivity that overcomes any internecine conflict or rupture. His community is bonded to the land and inseparably allied with the heavens. If Thoka remains snagged within history, Kupa’s vision is metaphysical. If, after John Fowles, ‘It is far less nature itself that is yet in danger than our attitude to it’, then, for Kupa, what should be changed is our ‘attitude’ – how we relate to the earth, to community, to nationhood, how we construct and reimagine a sense of place. This is certainly seminal to Mandela’s inaugural speech, in which hate must be overcome, despair endured, hope, above all, cherished.

This temperament is markedly present in Fumani Maluleke’s paintings made on grass mats. Another staple and symbol for rest, it conjures Maluleke’s record of his birth, precisely on one of these mats, and, more metaphorically, its generative relationship to the earth. After all, grass mats come from the earth, they are woven, collectively made and used, long before their imaginative retooling as supports for painting. However, if the miner’s or prisoner’s blanket carries an ominous history, the grass mat is wholly affirming – as beautiful as Mandela’s vision of greening grass. As for the content of Maluleke’s paintings? They too are largely records of pastoral or bucolic scenes, with benign visions of townships thrown into the mix. This is because Maluleke resists sorrow, because his vision is bonded to a fecund and nurturing earth. As for the overcast skies in his paintings? They are only portentous in so far as they auger rainfall.

That Maluleke chooses to tear apart the matting, allowing the dried grass to break away from the two-dimensionality of its planar surface, suggests an artist for whom materiality is as vital as the representational. This formal self-awareness is as evident in Kupa’s raw and rough painterly surfaces as it is evident in Thoka’s indented and stitched blankets. In each artist’s work the surface is distended. In each there is a keen grasp that art is never neutral, always uniquely made. That Africans, in particular, have demonstrated a stratospheric reimaging and retooling of global post-industrial waste – computer innards, say, global surplus of all kinds more generally – proves an acute reminder that no continent is better equipped to survive human excess. In the case of the paintings of Frans Thoka, Asanda Kupa, and Fumani Maluleke, we find a potent grasp of community, survival, and transfiguration.

Yet another artist shown at Artyli, and present in the shared conversation, was Henrico Greyling. A sculptor rather than a painter – though he practices in numerous styles and forms – Greyling too is acutely aware of the criticality of the earth as our beginning and end. However, if Maluleke has titled a show ‘No time like the future’, Greyling has titled his seminal installation ‘Archway to yesterday’. Maluleke’s vision is anticipatory, while Greyling’s is nostalgic. This is because he understands the vitality of the past as a site for renewal. His deconstructed steel archway – imaginatively conceived as a way-finder, a portal through which to return to his grandmother – is a reminder, after the great poet, TS Eliot, that ‘Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past’.  In other words, time does no operate causally, it possesses no beginning-middle-end, but is caught always in some ‘eternal present’.

If Eliot’s view is timely, it is because it reminds us that all of life, whether good or bad, returns, that evolution is elusive and illusionary. After all, ‘What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present’. Perhaps this is the lesson we must learn. That Mandela’s inaugural speech delivered thirty years ago remains ever-present. That the momentous historical moment in which we now find ourselves – the creation of a government of national unity on June 14 / the fight for liberation on June 16 – are the signals of promise in the now, in this moment, in which we also find ourselves reflecting on the art of four artists. What they express are different stories and feelings. When seen together, they offer us a greater vision of our lives – the struggles we continue to endure, the triumphs in our midst, as well as those that await us in this great land, on this good earth – in a future that is also eternally present in this moment on June 15 at Artyli.

Ntshabele’s artworks function as a double disruption to the Western art canon – first through the undaunted insertion of Black figures on canvas, and secondly within gallery spaces that were often permeated with colonial imagery. Ntshabele actualises decolonisation as art practice through historical visual assemblages; hereby subverting narratives of erasure by foregrounding the young and the maternal, most notably the motif of the Black child and the Black mother who are often marginalised.

Andrew Ntshabele’s work is an expression of juxtaposed temporality and in reaching into the depths of the archive, his artistic practice is an endeavour of radical remembrance. The archive plays a significant role in the visualisation and remembrance of identity. 

In Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression Jacques Derrida refers to the “future interior of the archive”, which speaks about the archive as a mnemonic device that does not look back at history, but rather it is exceptionally futuristic. The archive determines what  future generations will know, making it inherently ‘forward-looking’.

Andrew Ntshabele uses art to speak a poignant and authentic truth about the past, to and for the children and for those who have experienced oppression. Ntshabele’s art is birthed from spirit and prayer, deeply grounded in memory both personal and archival, yet bound by contemporary reflections that inspire a tender sense of hope. Ntshabele’s subject matter is not intended to cultivate division, but speaks of the need for a recognition of the past as a means of collective healing and reconciliation.

1. Derrida, J. 1995. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Diacritics, 25(2):9-6.

 Written by Keisha Jacobs 

In Discourse on Colonialism (a book described as a ‘poetics of anti-colonialism’ as a manifesto for the Third World) French poet, author and politician Aimé Césaire offers an in-depth critique of colonialism and its inherent contradictions. Colonialism (intricately linked to imperialism) was justified on the basis of Western progress. This “progress” was sought after at the expense of communities of colour. This was a “progress” saturated with mass racial subjugation, and violated human rights. Colonialism then is a subversion in and of itself, its own embedded ideals.

Thoka laments that historically humans have not been quite humane; his artwork is thus a message that signals an urgent return to our lost collective humanity. In using a distinct art medium of blankets, Thoka emphasises that there is a need for a social imperative of softer realities, for existences that do not reside at societal margins.

Thoka artistically speaks about the remnants of the apartheid regime and colonialism that continue to reside within racially marginalised communities. Remnants that have impacted cultural consciousness, identity and the navigation of public space through time. The art practice of Thoka is therefore radically decolonial.

Decolonisation is the process of ameliorating past socio-political injustices endured by former colonies through the struggles of redress and reclamation. Within an African context, decolonisation is a project of re-centring Africa and its people. It  provides Africans with an opportunity to narrate African histories and experiences from an authentically African perspective. 

The beaded works of contemporary African artist Morgan Mahape is a form of sustainable art depicting an intricate convergence of hued human figures and lustre landscapes. By underscoring the environmental impact of mass waste culture, Mahape artistically advocates for reduction and recycling, for the organic and the green. 

Mahape’s art medium of beads is an ode to the negation of value within African histories of trade and colonialism.  In archeological history, beads and beadwork can be traced back to the dawn of civilization, but its source, its origin, is Africa. The technological age of the art form can be determined by the material used. African beads were predominantly made from organic materials such as bone, (egg) shells and seeds. Africa has traded beads with countries situated in both Asia and Europe, but it was European beads made from glass that became rather popular and prized on the continent. Across the world beads are adornments and carriers of meaning -  communicating messages that are social and spiritual in nature. In Africa beads are important signifiers of culture and ethnicity which in part constitutes identity. 

Mahape weaves the individual to the community; his is a conscientious construction of a coming together that cannot be forsaken. Hence, a central thematic concern in the works of Mahape is that of community, in a global sense, but particularly in an African context.

The connection between the community and the individual is emphasised by the philosophy of communitarianism. The philosophy offers a critique against the belief that development is solely gained from (rugged) individualism. Instead it posits that the social identity and personality of an individual is significantly shaped by relationships made within a community.  In Western values, the individual is singular, while in Africa, the individual is defined according to the uniquely African ethos of Ubuntu which when translated means “I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am.”

 Written by Keisha Jacobs 

Daniel ‘Stompie’ Selibe forms creative novelty formed from deconstruction and then reconstruction of the existing. The details in Selibe’s artworks reveal diverse depth by design, as he brings the canvas to life through vivid colour and abstract mark-makings.

The art genre of Neo-Expressionism is distinguished by a return to painterly figurative representations of, but not limited to, the human form that are often distorted, which in the process, seamlessly merges the styles of figuration and abstraction. Neo-Expressionism stands in reaction, according to Sotheby’s to “detached intellectualism and ideological purity of Minimalism and Conceptualism.” 

The textural works of the Neo-Expressionist art genre are often considered to be violently emotive, capturing intense inner emotions and subjective perceptions of reality and ideas. The art movement sought to shift away from realism and non-representational to embody more expressionist art forms. Hence Neo-Expressionist artists, most notably which include Jean-Michel Basquiat, Anselm Kiefer, Enzo Cucchi, Julian Schnabel and the founder of the movement, Georg Baselitz, and many more, had multiple cultural names across the world such as ‘Neue Wilden’ (‘New Fauves’, derived from Fauvism) in Germany, ‘Transavanguardia’ (Transavantgarde) in Italy, and ‘Figuration Libre’ in France. 

The remedial melodies of music, particularly old-school jazz, guides Selibe’s visions and visualisation, as he translates the contours of chaos in the mind, those troubling thoughts from inner worlds that at times seem devoid of respite. For both Selibe and his audience, creative expression becomes the catharsis, for imagination and art coalesce to call us home.

 Written by Keisha Jacobs