Mysteries From Antiquity - On African Sacred Artefacts (Lydenburg Heads)

Collections are vital assets for museums, offering insight into the artistic and historical trends of a given era. They act not merely as historical artifacts but as living agents of yearning that bridge continuity and transformation. 

Making their collections seen and accessible is a crucial role of museums, one that is fundamentally bound up with their very function. The Cabinet of Curiosities in 16th-century Europe, regarded as the origin of the museum, displayed rare and exotic collections, providing audiences with novel experiences and opportunities for intellectual exploration. 

With the rise of the modern nation-state, the definition of “public” expanded, and works of art that had once been privately owned became accessible to wider audiences, ultimately evolving into the modern museum.

In Africa however, the rampant pillaging of cultural art and the theft of art meant a far more sinister project was unfolding; one that was characterised by erasure and displacement of an entire people from the annals of cultural history.

During colonial rule, African people lost thousands of cultural artefacts through the brutish plunder by colonists. These works addressed an entire psychological ecosystem of an oppressed people, in response to the censure experienced under guise of missions to “civilise the natives”.

Now that museums are calling for restitution and repatriation of stolen African artefacts, the overlooked question is that of a contemporary people who are grappling with the instability of meanings drawn from their vague past, when they have been denuded of any knowledge about these sacred objects and their worth.

When one observes what is often termed as macabre artefacts from arcane history, we come to question whether these artefacts are haunted objects as they’ve been known to cause all sorts of mayhem and social chaos.

These sacred objects found throughout the African continent for instance, are fundamentally associated with knowledge and are secretly preserved. Owning them or knowing about them commands attention and silence from those who cannot have access to them.

But I have often wondered what secrets lie behind the rarest and most treasured African artworks? The kind of pieces imbued with the weight of history, culture, and spirit all at once.

These creations weren't made just to be admired, they served purposes—spiritual, social, political—and each one has a unique tale to tell.

Sadly many of these rare artworks are hidden away in vaults, galleries, or private collections, far from their original homes. Some have been lost and found again, while others remain mysterious, sparking debates about ownership, legacy, and cultural pride.

A vigorous dialogue between heritage and contemporaneity is essential if the past is to preserved by contemporary generations for posterity. 

Only by revisiting sites of memory, can these reclamation expeditions infuse new modes of recollection and (post)memory, viewed through the lens of the contemporary social and cultural landscape.

And in light of this urgency, the post-1994 democratic government has made it a priority to restore dignity to those who were dehumanised by colonial and apartheid-era practices; a laudable effort in the face of rampant corruption within the art world in regards to illicit antiquities trade.

Recently, through the the Exile Repatriation Project and the Reburial of Khoi and San Ancestral Human Remains Initiatives, the government has spearheaded a revolutionary approach to reclaiming lost heritage by returning the remains of 58 ancestors.

There remains a vast array of misrepresentations and artefacts that remain to be repatriated, for instance the The Lydenburg Heads; a set of seven terracotta heads accidentally discovered by a ten-year-old boy in the South African town of Lydenburg. 

Should contemporary historians and artists reposition The Lydenburg Heads in their authentic African cultural  context, and repatriate from Iziko Museum in Cape Town to their communities whilst renaming them appropriately without disputes? 

Would this approach open old wounds or foster an inter-generational dialogue between those who shaped our cultural landscape and those addressing today’s urgency to redress falsifications and erasure thereof?

Excoriating The Wound and the World: On Khahliso’s ‘At Virtue’s Zone’

At Virtue's Zone

It is not helpless, it is not hopeless, it is just being portrayed that way. Without us paying attention, they will have nothing. Without us paying them for our attention, they will earn nothing. Without us bending over backwards to please them, they will break. Without us wanting to be just like them to be just like them to be just like them, their self image will shatter. Without us affording them the quality of anothers discomfort, there palaces will crumble. Without us conspiring and conforming with them, shelling out our cold finger cash to fund the completion of their high rise egos, there will be no more theaters of war no more cinemas of celluloid pain no more carbon copy shopping streets of fat ass consumers suffering from diminished muscle mass no more websites wiping clean our consciousness no more playgrounds for political savagery no more selling us choice when we realize that there is not much to actually choose from Without us being present they will be left to bite their fingernails down to the cuticles. Without us attending their feast they will still continue to be cannibals but will have less meat to pick off the bone. Without us they, the providers of helplessness and givers of hopelessness will be confronted by a new found silence one where the only sound to be heard will be that of their own heavy labored breathing alone and without us.

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Joshua Baumgarten 

Re(Thinking) Artistic Praxis - NEW Imagineers (Jalal Toufic)

 

Jalal Toufic in (Vampires), proposes that death is not a future event but a condition in which we already exist while physically alive. He also asserts that we constantly receive signals from versions of ourselves dwelling in the realm of the undead.

Politics, religion, social phenomena, colonialism and its irrevocable gestures, incisions that transform man without the possibility of reversal, and the instincts that arise from them, continue to inspire artistic practices of many artists of colour. 

This seems more attuned to what Jalal Toufic calls “the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster,” when grief and care of many beings who have crossed the boundary between life and death have taken a spiritual dynamic and reverence.

What then, is death when there are the un-dead?

Is death a state of continuous life at a level of decay, an inversion towards the negative, a way of undoing the orchestrated linearity of being?

The Unnerving Politics In Ayanda Mabulu’s Art

When do artists express their disdain for political systems governing everyday existence with extractionist impunity and nihilistic tendencies of self-gratification and enrichment? Do artists slash their canvases in rage or somber contemplation of ends, to the means by which devastation is crafted and executed?

A first encounter with Ayanda Mabulu’s work at Kalashnikov Gallery in Braamfontein left my senses unruffled by the splattered angst, and that iconic work depicted none other than the messianic Nelson Mandela laying dead on Winnnie Mandela’s matriarchal lap. 

Her maternal posture, devastated about the loss of sites of their intimate lives, detached from their own historical significance within the hierarchy of political importance; attest to the tone of the artist’s temperament when it comes to shattering social taboos.

The gallery was then dominated by this work amidst the cluttered walls of its miniature maze of rooms that felt more like an underground bunker partitions, and among other were further examinations of the state of a nation in disarray.

And what unnerved me was the artist’s interpretations of the South African mourned stalwart, as a helpless naked lump of ageing flesh slain in a political circus depicted in the assumed meaning of other pieces staring the situation in the countries political trajectory.

 

His many works detailing the fragilities of political egos, their mangled reflections bearing infinite witness to a world in which people and their ideas are captured, stand as testaments that art can jar and rip open scabs of a sedated yet wounded menial populace, faced with indignant barbarity. 

But, there is also a seductive immediacy of a graffiti like improvisation that lingers in paintings such as the LUCKY STAR series, delivering subversive political idioms, dissecting social complexities of this country with a non-hypocritical yet indignant eye.

As it seemed to offer insight into our infamously sycophantic leaders with a distinct penchant for disgust, his works often expose dysfuctionalities of political systems and their violence as the overarching theme that characterise SA in recent years.

The near collage technique that repurpose inherited emblems of power, speaks from framed voices that are personal, yet equally shaped by collective experiences of a despondent populace watching the vulgar comedy of errors engulf the state and the continent at large.

Somewhat a hybrid of western pop art, the art is not conciliatory in any sense but a critical one, shaped by political as well as religious iconography juxtaposed with the ongoing class struggles and mass media violence.

The somewhat multiplied images, amplifying messages that challenge the populist status enjoyed by figures in power, these lucky stars undimmed by scandals are probed by the artist who dares pull the veil from their bare asses.

Within the lineage of dissident art that is politically charged, Ayanda stands as an obscurely relevant artist at the pinnacle of sobering critiques on contemporary climates marked by wars and genocides, curt leaders and exploitation of many by an elite few.

Politically charged yet playfully vulgar gaze, bearing the unseen on canvas as instruments upon which memory relies, these indispensable bodies of men and women of history are laid bare for their nativities and controversies.

Often, his work makes caricatures of struggle stalwarts pitted against the backdrop their other present incarnations, these altered icons of martyrdom (as Winnie and Nelson Mandela were viewed), are slightly vilified by their seemingly unflinching defiance of death and their uncanny stealth for corruption even at old age.

What seems to concern Ayanda is the proliferation of laudatory works that resemble propagandist images of dictators, given undue credit for heroism in the glaring face of starved orphans leering through electric wires around mansion of “liberators of the people”.

Zuma is a perfect muse of imperfection in posture and self-aggrandising actions, his popularity immortalised by his penchant for indigenising mediocre strategies under guise of traditionalism, or the “people’s way”, and Ayanda peels through the facade, exposing cracks in the somewhat enamoured posture of post-apartheid leadership.

His work undeniably presents a microcosm of black Africa as championed by the affluent who passed into their oppressors’ shoes, clones into replicas of western colonial posture without any preamble to make their “new whiteness” comfortable.

Ayanda’s visions become a vessel for the world’s untold, hidden behind decorum and protocols, the sordid betrayals of liberation ideas by men standing on the shoulders of giants whilst pissing the revolutionary tradition down clogged drains.

Each image’s inter-subjectivity cannot be understood solely through habits of subjective references and analysis, the normative recognition of semblances, but only through delving into each figure’s concealed characters. 

Pigments of moral decay and obscene displays of uncensored and callous gluttony, pseudo-machismo suited and seated on pedestals overlooking entangled realities of wealth and poverty; these theme of access and inconspicuous consumption function both symbolically and practically.

Englobing the conscious and the unconscious rebellions aroused by continued plunder by these elites, there are renditions of presidents satirised as the joker or the vampire, images that require a poetic imagination to dissect their meaning.

Resonant meanings are dispersed throughout his work, with newspaper clippings lending factuality, and commercial brands replicas outfitted to expose ulterior, not as outpours rage alone but forms of atonement for being willing victims to the domination of our collective psyche as black South Africans.

Far beyond those serenely majestic landscapes of rurality, this artist seems obsessed with inner mounds of debris left looking like calcified skins on bones exhausted by culling, each painted stroke of a sinew stretching across vast bodies decomposed by greed.

Through his work, the artist reveals diverse metamorphoses of revered personages in light of their current collapse into treachery and self-deification. The characters in his paintings elude traditional thought patterns and categories because they seem other-worldly, although each bearing recognisable resemblance to known figures.

Inspired by mythology, pop, and everyday culture, as well as cultural-historical references, Ayanda continues to carve a niche for art that unravels the seams of those gowns of power, clad by clown in castles usurped through other people’s blood.

 And this uncanny visual device also serves as a microscopic view of the persons concerned, activating their pasts, interweaving it with the present; the artist questioning the art world's rules of engagement with subjects while simultaneously challenging expectations and interpretations.

 

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Images Sourced Online 

Writer

you art a lone figure violently slashing pages

writing a bridge between messy souls

a diary of conflicts and absurdities 

a metaphor for a congregation that is suspended between devotion and restraint

Art In (COLOUR)

 

Much of history left profound emotional scars on the historicity of many cultures and any research on African values, creativity and ancestral practices aligns with a desire to reinvent the misconception and conservative notion that people of colour lack the spiritual acumen to conceive and comprehend art.

The common narrative has been that sites of memory such as museums should only be the preserve of white supremacist history that is both personal to many white and universally resonant with other projects of colonial displacement of various people of the land.

It become essential for any thinker to begin probing the boundaries between the mundane and the mystical as created by the artefacts in these places, the images, the antiquated furnishings and models clad in garments thought to reimagine the past.

Instead of indulging nostalgia, many artists of colour endeavour to reactivate marginalized cultural memories, backdropped by a vision of "ancestrality”, continually navigating a plethora of coaxed memories, others replicated and censored by veneers of self-illusory joys.

This act of artistically re-imagining sites of memory is a mode of inquiry into the intersection between physical and psychological impacts of such sites; a form of séance in relation to how spiritualism permeates art as a tool that captures times and spaces.

Falsifications of historical events and the ways in which identities of black people have been staged over time are falling apart at the seams however, and this mirrors how our silences are instruments and sites of racial anxiety which must be destabilised by confrontations, academic or artistic.

This cultural annexations of the past have left dissent perspectives on the value of monuments and other colonial sites of the oppressor’s visions of the past, yet it remains upon the shoulders of artists to examine how colonialism has shaped the ways museums, archives and other institutions of knowledge are perceived and understood, revealing the immaterial (and lack of material evidence of the colonised) scars imposed by systemic violence.

Debates surrounding the restitution of cultural heritage taken during colonial periods have intensified, accompanied by a growing recognition of persistent social injustices in society, yet while academics and museum professionals have led much of the discussion, artists  must play a role in expanding conversations around decoloniality, restitution, and reparative justice. 

In a time when traditional values are being lost under the pressure of consumerism; class, ethnicity, gender and many other factors that all too often result in social exclusion emerge. Those subjected to intersecting forms of discrimination such as racism, colonial trauma and brutality, perceive the role of colonial monuments, museums and their artefacts as entrenching memories of oppression, where blackness is confronted on all side by erasure.

Concerned with these entrenched hierarchies and their invisible role in shaping the world around us, artists of colour continue to forge connections between non-Western cultures and erased cultures of colonised people, often in ways that challenge conventional delineations and the Eurocentric gaze.

These artists provide examinations of the psychic conflict which results from the desire to both belong to and resist a society which denies blackness even as it affirms its inferiority, exploring boundaries between environment, politics and the personal which are constantly shifting.

 

Their work often leans toward forms of reprieve, towards possibilities of uplift after downfall, often in the context of the historic and ongoing oppression of Black people and the politics of their representation at the centre of global monoculture. 

Their work even dares to examine propensities for self-hate among people of colour (the oppressed), their self-destructive habits, and other patterns of social activity to analyse the nature of individual personalities. 

Yet, this form of solidarity with the oppressed is increasingly corroded by discriminatory practices and rhetoric that promote western monoculture, and only dissent and the generative potential of collective resistance can be the sole mode of confronting our collective mis-representations as obscured identities.

Often, these artists turn to atmospheres and residues that social practices leave behind; probing what persists in shadow, where light and darkness intertwine with notions of both individual and collective memory.

Like a poet reciting their words, the act of reading is a declarative gesture of presence, reclaiming the notion of memory as a dissident mode to critique norms of memory, conveying a sense of both precariousness and vulnerability, experimentation and ingenuity.

And contending with memory’s resistance to categorization, artists, writers and poets of colour often invoke alternate temporalities, amplifying their creatively transgressive voices and fostering critical conversations around identity and dissent.

Theirs is a sensitive attunement to histories that remain excluded from official narratives, but that are contained and conveyed by nature, buildings, and landscapes and gravesites where unnamed ancestors are buried. Through words and other crafted methodologies of reflecting on memory, artists often have to summon histories of colonial resistance,

Vandalising the status quo and its foundations. Yet these acts of ruination constitute a quiet defiance, a deep confidence in the poetics of lived experience, deeply rooted in the history of the land and those to whom they belong.

What counts as truth as espoused by science, for instance? Science is not a conclusive system but a subjective construction—a temporary attempt to impose order on something that ultimately remains unknowable.

But in what ways can art expand and safeguard the language of truth and the process of truth-telling in an era of falsifications and non-truths?

To safeguard this reverence of truth as a spiritual force, fostering psychological and physical healing simply through presence and exposure, artist use various rituals, resurrecting diverse cultural matrices shaped by resistance and creativity, narratives that are languorous, humorous and somewhat melancholic.

The fault line between what we think we know and what eludes our understanding, tests our perception and dismantles its boundaries, and it is precisely in not knowing that the imagination begins.

Often reworking popular formats into speculative, allegorical forms, the artist new trajectory is now towards investigating how built environments embody histories of forced migration and displacement and exploring colonial intent and possibilities for infrastructures of knowledge that evolved into falsities that haunt today's rediscovered truths.

And as the global discourse around reparations maintains a negotiation between museums and other governmental bodies and communities for the return of cultural objects, artists question the intent of mechanisms of contemporary preservation. Are museums best places for the looted heritage of victims of colonial plunder?

Although there have been several instances of successful returns made possible by these inter-institutional collaborations, there remains a vast array of valid and legitimate criticisms of their shortcomings in addressing the wishes of affected communities, who are often left in the margins. 

Museums have long been recognised as custodians of imperial legacies, eliciting sustained critique and repeated calls for their deconstruction. Attempts to address these entangled and often contested pasts have generated both significant critique and meaningful collaboration. 

The dissident artists seeks to critically engage with this paradox, posing the question of what further strategies and frameworks might be developed to advance the transformative potential of museums in the present.

Crucially, these disparate creative practitioners take a comprehensive and obsessive questioning of why there aren’t any architecturally resilient infrastructure created for intellectual and cultural heritage of people of African descent?

Colonial artists produced some of the earliest depictions of Indigenous and enslaved people of Southern Africa —idealised scenes that obscure the violence of colonialism. They also painted elaborate hunting still lifes and portraits of patrons whose fortunes derived from imperial trade and slavery, which populate many museum walls, exposing the operations of the white gaze.

And as whiteness often seems a reactionary society strongly influenced by the church and the fascist past rooted in white supremacy, it begs one to confront the dissolution of this myth at all its enclaves; from the monumental churches and museums, to the states littered across landscapes of usurped lands.

But to prove the non-durability and bad craftsmanship that goes into projects that purport to commemorate collective memories of black folk, it has also become essential to investigate these meagre spaces in contrast to the vandalised monuments erected under the auspices of the colonialist historian and religionists.

For the dissent artists confronting dissonant heritage, a number of pivotal questions should be addressed to reimagine the realities of division and colonial oppression from the lens of conquest, as the past remains a contested space where we can exist not as conquerors or observers, but as participants in an ongoing dialogue of meaning. 

But to sense anew the pulse of the present that flows through every living thing, dissident art should transform into an agent of self-definition and resistance, it must transform personal longing into a public cultural expression; a moment suspended between past and possibility, where the act of creation and recreation mean the broken bits of an illusive past and its truths.

And in order to respond with these colonial artefacts and images from our own archives as people of colour is a collective project of confrontation, confronting erasure and censure, creating a space of resonance within the past through the present, where the past and future exist in communion with the deep rhythms of the possible.

It is a confrontation of grief that often forces art to return to the traces left behind by what is lost, striving to combine empathy with the impossible. This creative ritual is a critical process of mourning that embraces both the personal and collective dimensions of traumatic experiences, akin a family archive and the collective dimension of a shared heritage.

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Art By: Harmonia Rosale