Nduduzo Makhathi

 

 

Nduduzo Makhathini’s music has always intrigued me since my first encounter with his sound at The Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2015, when he, together with Tumi Mogorosi, Mthunzi Mvubu, Robin Fasciae Kock, Ariel Zamonsky mesmerised music loveers with compositions and renditions which reinvigorated by belief in the hauntingly unrequited quality of South African Jazz. 

Over the course of the following years, I witnessed a serene evolution that embraced spirituality in all its sonic metaphors that linger to soften even the staunch hearts of those who denigrate African virtuosity. 

Read more: https://anirrationaldiary.blogspot.com/search?q=JAG

And in the tradition of sounds that merges the uneasy traumas of our collective past with the present, the IKHAMBI sessions at The Pan African Station in 2017 struck a chord in my soul that left me bereft of breath. It conjured up a a pervasive sense of interrupted transmissions from the spiritual, navigating the plane of the flesh.

 

Music that brings the mystical into the suspended space of memory, perfectly crafted yet imperfectly translated through nuanced flaws, broken scales irregular in form, with proportions that lend an uncanny effect of improvisation and mishaps.

What is spirituality in this case, because often this seance with the unknowable is relegated into realms of mystery, but here I infer to the living soul of a song that knows a language forgotten, melodies that seem like chords struck from primordial keys embedded in genes of current listeners.

I recall an artist inferring that we enter the world through our eyes, and it enters our inner worlds through our ears, and listening to Nduduzo’s Ikhambi felt akin to a reawakening, whence my inner contemplation is invaded by a foreign entity pent on inducing visions and memories buried with a thousand murdered ancestors. 

Compelled to the unthinkable splendours of imagined utopias of the soul, the song in its compositional complexity is unwoven by The Cure cCollective in ways that can only be deemed ingeniously mature for these young musos at play.

And though obscuring their intended catharsis, they narrow their improvisational excursion to a minimum, allowing for each instrumentalist to reinterpret and invigorate new meanings to the composition, guided by Makhathini’s pianistic elegance cognisant of the gravity of the proverb in their song.

Ikhambi left me amused by its eccentricity which roused my personal dissonance of feelings suspended between two worlds,  furthered through and located in the disorienting headspace between the two, hence I found myself intreating its essence through video art.

Paul Zisiwe

 

Video Art - Khahliso Matela Portfolio

Khahliso Matela Video Art 

Planet Past

Someone once said that the past is place you can’t visit. 

He said that “planet past” does exit. Hence it can’t be visited by even out most expedient time travelling scientists. 

But is the past truly a phantasm and an enigma that cannot be fully “perceived”? 

Can the past be perceived without computational decoding of substrate memories cleaved from those discarded in dreams? 

Are those dreamscapes, realities that should not be understood by the waking mind?

What of the nature of layers one excavates within this “self”, the intuitive and “deconditioned,” or unhinged bodily flow of experiments on a world that transcend verbal and societal categorization?

Any commitment to the principle that reality is to some degree constructed and contextual, that this world is more various than any one system of knowledge can account for; that this world contains many worlds, is indisputable.

CREATIVE COLLABORATION - An Exhibition

 

The Potchefstroom Museum Gallery has over the years dedicated its efforts towards exposing unknown and experimental artists from various under-resourced communities, and recently an exhibition  was held to celebrate current voices in the art scene within the region.

The gallery continues to cultivate an environment conducive to focused creativity and communal reflection, exploring shared spaces that foster creative encounters and collaborations.

The exhibition is a constellation of innovative and alternative artistic practices that might shed light on our own unsettled present.

In staging representations of contemporary perspectives on cultural identities — the CREATIVE COLLABORATION exhibition presents and opens a space for new examinations of a diverse range of artists whose expressive natures are characterised by their traumas and methods of reconstructing the shattered. 

Through photography, Andile Mayekiso explores an ever more intimate glimpses into the hidden yet explicit lives of others, a welcome reminder that while material wealth and inherited privilege have shaped the country’s turbulent modern history, survival amid ruins remains a reality with which we constant contend.

Daniel Tladi, through his landscape painting, he produces a poetic visibility that reveals relations of power and injustices, but at the same time conveys tenderness and dignity. His art affirms that we are surrounded by other worlds hidden in backwater country spaces characterised by abandoned farms, dispossessed farm labourers and peri-urban realities.

The works therefore begs the question of restitution of land for the indigenous people who were displaced and dispossessed, and turned into menial labour on the farmlands of their ancestry.

Rethabile Weevirs is yet another voice that was exposed through this exhibition, and one of her works, reminiscent of Miles Davis’ Filles De Kilimanjaro album cover art, evokes a nostalgia for both the past and the future. Her work thus appears serene at first glance but conveys an overwhelming sense of a haunting vision of the eye as a reflective mirror into which souls are etched and stained.

The exhibition focuses on the inseparable relationship between humans and their immediate surroundings, places where they find comfort and security, and humanity’s capacity for renewal.

Revealing both optimism and analysis of social conditions, the artists exhibited here grapple with ideas of identity, land and poverty, while also celebrating the impact of time on all objects held dear by humans. 

There are intimate portraits by Marrak Art, where each portrait reveals subtle characteristics of elegance and personal freedom, flamboyant expressions unique to each subject’s ways of sensing the world and thinking about the self.

In a fractured world there is beauty in the ways that decays consumes artefacts of human significance. The automobile rendered obsolete by the power of time, consumed by climes and their treacherous changes, but that which remains are remnants, broken, yet signifying a life past and relegated to memory. 

Discarded by aggressive and hostile consumerism, these remnants become surreal images that populate Andre Austin’s work. The rusted enamel mugs, the decaying wall and the absurd rendition of Salvardo Dali’s Persistence Of Memory leave the viewer glancing into often overlooked and uncomfortable awareness of decay and impermanence.

Through this exhibition visitors will discover beauty and hopeful messages through the artists’ eyes and experience the transformative journey from rural landscapes to cityscapes and imaginative spaces that celebrate historical figures, the under privileged as well as the forgotten. 

Paul Zisiwe 2025

Untitled #25

In any familiar image lingers a latent yearning for alternative ways in which meaning can be subtly altered and pushed into abstraction. 

Abstractions are articulated in this video poem as conditions of becoming rather than a fixed state, forcing us to contemplate and look at anew.

And even if figures appear in some parts of this continuous flow of images, they are pushed into an abstract and strangely disembodied state.

But when interwoven with archival audio, the juxtaposition lays bare links between colonial infrastructure rooted in the dispossession of indigenous land and contemporary conditions of inequality obscured by the illusion of progressive motion towards modernity.

The lucid monologues by stalwarts such as Dr. Nthato Motlana and Dr. Mangosuthu Buthelezi, by undermining established patterns of thought ascribed to visuals, invite viewers to explore alternative modes of recalling, a sonic mapping of our present through voices from the past.

The past is by no means silent; it is full of sounds that can be rediscovered through research, and these sounds, voices, slogans and hymns simulate the archetypal sounds of revolution, and reveal their psychoacoustic potential for rousing activism in the contemporary mind.

UNTITLED #25 thus explores colonial archives, retrieves erased narratives, and proposes new languages of struggle, a grammar of dissidence, which is characterised the struggle for freedmen South Africa.

Senqu - Life Across The River

 Senqu - Life Across The River

This is the story of a youngly counsellor working deep in the mountains of Lesotho, to ensure that terminally ill patients get  daily support and supervision that guides them to health. Karabo Rakolobe is a young man raising his small family with his dedicated partner. He wakes up each day to travel long distances to reach far-flung villages to consult and visit sickly people who would otherwise be unable to reach medical facilities.

And while his family provides moments of respite within an immersive environment of the sick and dying, he continues to express a sense of hope, hope in a world that seems inundated with strife and poverty.

Yet, his daily existence opens up ways to understand the desperate times and modes of existence shaped by different social circumstances, allowing us a glimpse into the power of human interaction and its therapeutic attributes.