It’s impossible to encounter the work of Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year for Visual Arts, Mohau Modisakeng and not have to deal with the blackness of his skin. It shimmers and radiates to foreground the socio-historical facts that skin colour over-determines. The exhibition that hangs at the 1820 Settler’s Monument is also loaded. Along with vignettes of his township life experience in the twilight years of apartheid, Modisakeng’s work deals with excesses of the same settler related histories of conquest.
The show comprises a grand sculptural installation, photographs and a four panelled video projection. Modisakeng’s central materials are coal, black ink and the racialised human body – his own. The visual impact of it all immediately brings up ideas of mining labour and its related troubles to mind. The artist also weaves in personal myths and themes of public conflict to form a stark portrait of the black condition today.
The exhibition is tilted Lefa La Ntate which in English means “my father’s inheritance.” As a young black male in a South Africa that is battling an often gendered legacy of violence and exploitation, Modisakeng confronts this legacy in his own life as a son, citizen and as an artist. His search for viable grammar to navigate and articulate its meaning takes him everywhere, even into spirituality. So he mines his own dreams, tales told to him by his mother and other personal archives. In this way, his body becomes a site of excavation and performed mediation of economies of meaning.
In the four panelled video projection, the artist appears as a lone character clad in a white gown, a rabbi’s black sun hat and a horse’s head harness. His bare feet are bone-white and match the colour of his robe and the sharp axe he wields as he runs across a ghostly coal field. As he slides, climbs and trips over the mounds of shimmering coal, the camera lifts and dips to transform how he is seen. At once, he appears stalked by an unseen sinister presence and looks like a stalker himself. He is at once vulnerable and threatening. These oscillations are central to the structural ambivalence and the histories of violence that Modisakeng seeks to activate with his work.
Travelling Tour Dates:
2016 - June/July
National Arts Festival Grahamstown
Contact: Mr Ismail Mahomed
Contact number: (046) 603 1103
July/August/September
Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum
1 Park Drive
Port Elizabeth
Contact: Emma O'Brien/ Melanie Hillebrand
Contact number: (041) 506 2000
Open: 27 July 2016
Close: 2 September 2016
October/November/December/January 2017
IZIKO South African National Gallery
Government Avenue
Cape Town
Contact: Andrea Lewis/ Ernestine White/ Ingrid Masondo
Contact number: (021) 481 3974
Open: 20 October 2016
Close: 29 January 2017
2017 February/ March/ April
Johannes Stegmann Art Gallery
SASOL UFS Library Building
University of the Free State
Nelson Mandela Drive
Bloemfontein
Contact: Angela De Jesus
Contact number: (051) 401 2706
Open: 22 February 2017
Close: 31 March 2017
April/May
Tatham Art Gallery
Chief Albert Luthuli Road (Opposite City Hall)
Pietermaritzburg
Contact: Brendan Bell/ Bryony Clark
Contact number: (033) 392 2801
May/June/July
Standard Bank Gallery
Corner Simmonds and Frederick Streets
Johannesburg
Contact: Sue Isaacs
Contact number: (011) 631 4467
Open: 26 May 2017
Close: 8 July 2017
July/August/September
NWU Gallery, Potchefstroom
Building E7
North-West University Potchefstroom Campus
Hoffman Street
Potchefstroom
Contact: Christina Naurattel, Gallery Manager
Contact number: (018) 299 4341
Open: 20 July 2017
Close: 25 August 2017
By Percy Mabandu
Percy Mabandu is an award winning art journalist and author of the recently published Yakal’ Inkomo -Portrait of a Jazz Classic; a book about the historic South African jazz record by the late Winston Mankunku Ngozi. He has written for publications including City Press, Mail & Guardian, Rolling Stone and many others