Ikhono LaseNatali – Notes on an Experiment
This text was written as part of an experiment hosted by A4 Arts Foundation and coordinated by heeten bhagat with Nisha von Carnap and Zack Viljoen. The participants included Kgosi Motsoane, Ian Mangenga, Tshetsana Ngidi, Zahra Abba Omar, Rowallan Vorster, and Lucienne Bestall.
The experiment took as subject Sir Professor Zanele Muholi’s Ikhono LaseNatali, an exhibition of 25 young artists from Durban.
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A girl says: her hair looks like a crown. A cell phone goes off. The comment is left unconsidered. The guide (turning off her phone) says – this is an image of oppression. This image is about the apartheid pencil test.
(The implied unsaid: There will be no power here)
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Twenty-five artists and twenty-five names: Nhlanhla Chonco, Mduduzi Dzanibe, Thalente Khomo, Lindokuhle Khumalo, Bongani Luthuli, Sthenjwa Luthuli, Morgan Mahape, Nkosikhona Majola, Mpilo Makhanya, Andile Maphumulo, Mthobisi Maphumulo, Buhle Wonder Mbambo, Mondli Mbhele, Ncumisa Mcitwa, Khulekani Mkhize, Nhlakanipho Mkhize, Mlamuli Mkhwanazi, Sphephelo Mnguni, Thembi Mthembu, Londiwe Mtshali, Nomusa Mtshali, Lungisani Ndlovu, Major Ndlovu, Lindani Nyandeni, Zwelinjani Radebe.
No – twenty-six names. The first name, written in large, capital letters: ZANELE MUHOLI. The ARTIST.
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Let the record state:
Muholi is an internationally celebrated PRIME art practitioner and visual activist with the pronouns “They/Them/Theirs.”
– Dr. Bajabulile La Dhlamini Sidzumo’s curatorial statement for Ikhono LaseNatali
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This is a work about Marikana – the guide says. She gestures to the mining helmet. The red symbolises blood. She points to the background. If only all lines could be so clearly drawn.
(The colour of Marikana is not red but green, the green of a blanket against the dry, brown earth)
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In late 2018, Muholi commissioned 25 emerging artists to interpret photographic images from their ongoing self-portrait series Somnyama Ngonyama, a project that speaks to the social ills associated with politics of race, gender, politics, collectivism and sexuality faced by South Africans, and others globally. Collectivism and visibility are core values firmly rooted in the heart of the project.
– Dr. Bajabulile La Dhlamini Sidzumo’s curatorial statement for Ikhono LaseNatali
NOTE: The social ill of collectivism, the core value of collectivism. The politics of politics.
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The children begin their guided tour with a song; the national anthem sung to a different tune.
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The pronoun they reveals itself not only a neutral, ungendered word but a recognition of multiplicity. When we speak of them, we are speaking both of the ARTIST and of the artist’s images hung about the room.
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The words elude us; we have too many – all inexact, all not quite right:
Interpret, re-interpret, translate, transcribe, paraphrase, replicate, duplicate, reproduce, mimic, imitate, copy.
Or rather, re-interpret, translate, transcribe, paraphrase, replicate, duplicate, reproduce, mimic, imitate, copy.
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Someone suggests the exhibition is a disguised narcissistic gesture.
Someone proposes the exhibition is not a project of social development but a conceptual sleight-of-hand.
Later: someone asks at what point a patron becomes patronizing.
Sixty pairs of eyes watch us as we talk, follow us, reprimand us, tell us off for our cynicism, our confusion, our criticism.
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There is the their that belongs to the twenty-five artists – someone says – and the their of the ARTIST. We speak of their images, their work and find the first meaning to be indistinct from the second.
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The Durban-born visual activist Sir Zanele Muholi’s return to Durban has given birth to a thrilling experimental body of work which promotes local artists.
– Thobeka Bhenga’s curatorial statement for Ikhono LaseNatali
The eye catches on the word-thorn of thrilling.
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The position of the ARTIST’S original image is unclear, here where all these works come to stand for it in its absence, to precede it, replace it. But the artists’ names cannot displace the first, the works cannot disentangle themselves from those three syllables. MUHOLI is woven into each canvas, caught in the paint, written in charcoal, threaded like beads on string.
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A momentary consensus: the exhibition is at once a surrendering of the ARTIST’S power in the reproduction of their images and a controlled exercise in which the ARTIST is primary.
(The ARTIST, someone suggests, as benevolent dictator)
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With the series Somnyama Ngonyama, I have decided to turn the camera on myself. In contrast to my life-long project of documenting members of my black LGBTI community in South Africa and beyond, one in which I normally have the privilege of witnessing participants’ presentation of themselves according to their own self-image, with this new work I have created portraits in which I am both participant and image-maker… I have investigated how photographers can question and deal with the body as material or mix it with objects to further aestheticise black personhood.
– Zanele Muholi in the 2018 press release for Somnyama Ngonyama at Stevenson
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Someone says: so often the artists painted the ARTIST’S body black, as though the word ‘black’ precedes the fact of black bodies’ skin.
There is black, and there is black.
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and someone is telling me about contronyms,
how “cleave” and “cleave” are the same word
looking in opposite directions. I now know
“bolt” is to lock and “bolt” is to run away.
– Terrance Hayes’ New York Poem, 2010
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/ We find ourselves speaking in platitudes and catch-phrase rhetoric. We bend the language to our needs, try to speak beyond the habits of our words. We work at the artists’ images as they have worked at the ARTIST’S – we too have become a part of Muholi’s project; we pass the parcel, play broken telephone along with them; the ARTIST and the artists, the them and the them. Images multiply, reproduce in their mediums. From the first photos to their inexact copies – to our collective words. /
