Friday, October 24, 2025

Video Art And The Decline of “History”?


The word “history” came into being, because our events were told and written down thereafter. Now history is being recorded in images or video. Therefore from now on there is no more “History”, but only “Imagery” or “Videory”. 

  • Nam June Paik, Binghamton Letter(1972)


“We live in an age where truth is constructed from images, not from facts.” 

  • Simon Fujiwara


As we live in a post-narrative condition, not the end of storytelling but its overflow into new forms. Stories appear between what we choose and what chooses us, across screens and devices, beneath conscious thought.


Through video art, I undertake journeys into the limits of our perception and imagination, triggering images and ideas that, in turn, point towards new realities

and the self-involved thoughts transformed into surreal playgrounds.



It is often said that a document is a record of fact-based information, traditionally in the form of words but more recently also as images such as photographs and moving images. The word “documentary,” meanwhile, has come to be used not only as an adjective meaning “factual” or “consisting of documents,” but also as a noun referring to a film expressing facts.


But my video poems are NOT fact based as much as they deal with the hyper-realities of the mind conjuring their self-destruction and re-assimilation in the real and natural realm. These video poems is are interplay between deliberation and intuition in art practice.

  

Let's begin first by dissecting and reassessing the unofficial history of imagery as found in sculptures, mosaics and buildings; unfolding those lesser-told layers of its vibrant evolutions until contemporary manifestations. Memories and their counter-memories are fragments upon which I construct visual interpretations not bound by traditional definitions or criteria for artistic representation, but used as a lens that looks at both personal and collective memories.


My video art therefore is a porous network of cultural dialogue and engagements, and it stems from an insane and very profound distrust of imagery, which in turn roused the need for orality and at times textualization of narratives in most of my projects. Through the use of “hijacked” images from popular culture, mainstream movies and publicity materials, the forensic-poetic work is affirmed by inner questions raging from faces of nameless objects and individuals reduced to symbols.


The underlying critical question is what the art can imply for life through suspension of genre-specific boundaries and redefining a new synthesis of the disciplines that explore the collective, the ephemeral, the occasional and yet psychotic engagement with a traumatising world. These video artworks are hence articulated as material testimonies to trauma, using cinema as the language of conflict , to expunge history from corruption. 



Video art has always been to express different forms of resistance to dehumanization and interrogate the social fascination with memory erasure and contemplate the conditions of collective amnesia, where the marginalized and nameless, embrace their fluid identities through multiple possibilities of narratives.


This gelatine based pathway into dreams, recognizes the human in the abysmal, the timeless in the archival and the true in the alienated observations of light shed on obscurities. And “Human" here, is etymologically related to the word "humus," which is soil. 


This cinematic art is far from representational or unambiguous. There are always ‘tipping points’, ambiguities and multiple meanings, less concerned with a concrete reproduction of reality than with “interpreting existence”, sometimes utilizing technical glitches as tools, and rewriting visual narrative paths in atypical ways.


Rather than follow predetermined paths, video art moves across shifting contours, layered fictions and shifting realities, lead us down unanticipated paths.


These appropriated manipulated images subjected to a series of physical alterations and even macabre that they portray, they have been penetrating deeper into the unconscious of technological society


Blending storytelling with critical and dissenting narratives, the video work subverts the polarising structures shaping our understanding of the world, and, explores the anxieties provoked by the uncertainties and social injustices of our time.


By examining the perpetuation of systems of classification through the continuation of colonial tropes in cataloguing and conserving historical events through various media, evoking a metaphorical resonance between land privatization histories and the process of memory.


Video Art therefore embraces incompletion as a generative method for pushing inherited fragments and unresolved ideas into motion, juggling a paradoxical dynamic of gazing while being gazed at, offering sensorial testimony to the historical traumas, and the fragile and illusory nature of social systems we live in.


Within a contemporary visual climate in which images appear to precede reality, an era where reality is thought to be the outcome of images rather than images being an outcome of reality, how do archival images lay claim to representing truth?


And as modernity’s separation of the mind from the body is damaging to ourselves and the planet is apparent, how will technological modes of recording reality alter our recollections of reality?



Video art therefore embraces glitches and errors that are treated not as failures but as methods. They create cracks where new meanings slip through, moments where the story branches unexpectedly into fault lines point to the politics of narrative: who gets to tell the story, who is written in, and what is left unsaid.


Interweaving the personal and the collective, in other words, a holistic unfolding of memories and socio-cultural associations., video art is a contingent process of creating meaning of identity and collective biography.


Video art practice includes appropriating museum collection audio-visually and representing them in a new formulaic symbolism, allows for an ethical approach to retracing the traces of various voices and images that have been constructed and erased throughout history, bringing the repressed and overlooked to the forefront, inscribing them into the local context, thus opening a dialogue between time, place and history.


The archival artefacts alluded to include sound-based and silent works, yet within which sound is always present—sometimes heard, sometimes only imagined - yet retaining and relating to the partially obscured histories of human reality.


The resultant visual experiments recreate visual narratives that draw on stories that resonate with the current resurgence of discourse about archival truisms and heritage preservation. Furthermore they employ montage to juxtapose appropriated images, generating new meanings, offering a careful reflection on appropriation and collaboration, foregrounding the artist’s role as art historian, documentarist, and archivist.


This archives-based video art practice therefore operates at the intersection of cinema and historical research of heritage of absurd histories and rituals as varied as cinema screenings, psychoanalytic sessions, and experimental theatrical performances are model for exhibitions: they are mediated experiences by which to access worlds beyond the everyday and connects these emancipatory practices to anti-colonial and anti-capitalist movements in the present.


Video art becomes the ever more refined messenger for a modern world that might be seen beyond appearances, it announces new orders of vision, it gives the future something more than an image, embracing the idea that everything we think we know is, to some degree, a constructed narrative.



This Is What Cinema Is All About.

Images, sound, whatever, are what we use to construct a way which is cinema, which is supposed to produce effects, not only in our eyes and ears, but in our "mental" movie theater in which image and sound already are there. There is a kind of on-going movie all the time, in which the movie that we see comes in and mixes, and the perception of all these images and sound proposed to us in a typical film narration piles up in our memory with other images, other associations of images, other films, but other mental images we have, they pre-exist. So a new image in a film titillates or excites another mental image already there or emotions that we have so when you propose something to watch and hear, it goes, it works. It's like we have sleeping emotions in us all the time, half-sleeping, so one specific image or the combination of one image and sound, or the way of putting things together, like two images one after another, what we call montage, editing - these things ring a bell. These half-asleep feelings just wake up because of that - that is what it is about. This is not to make a film and say: "Okay, let's get a deal, let's tell the story, let's have a good actress, good-bye, not bad," and we go home and we eat. What I am dealing with is the effects, the perception, and the subsidiary effects of my work as proposals, as an open field, so that you can get there things you always wanted to feel and maybe didn't know how to express, imagine, watch, observe, whatever. This is so far away from the strong screenplay, the beautiful movie, etc., that sometimes I don't know what I should discuss. You understand, this is really fighting for that "Seventh Art" which is making films.


Agnès Varda 

 

Wednesday, October 22, 2025

ECHOES OF HISTORY BETRAYED

 

ECHOES OF HISTORY BETRAYED


The 1980s was a decade which became a turning point in South African history. Popular protest by masses of ordinary South Africans against the apartheid regime reached its height in the 1980s, and the government responded with extreme brutality and repression.


On July 20, 1985, faced with the collapse of its authority in the townships, the continuing prospect of spreading violence, and an increasingly uneasy white population, the government responded with its first state of emergency over many parts of the country. 


The State Of Emergency was re-introduced in 1986 when the elimination of people who were considered the enemies of the apartheid state was deemed of confidential importance.


At no time had apartheid been resisted by as large and united a constituency as in the 1984-1986 period, in spite of PW Botha’s vicious and repressive reign.


It was during this time that a number of activists disappeared under suspicious circumstances, many of whom were never found. Boikie Tlhapi, was one among the many voices that continue to haunt the present from the unresolved past.


The story of Boikie Tlhapi is undeniably full of contradictions, and those emerge with all recollections about the man and his activism from those who were closely related to him, either through the struggle or familial relations.


His death in the hands of the apartheid police continues to haunt the community, more so, those who were once incarcerated with him and those who were part of the protestation he spearheaded within the community of Ikageng.


These unsung heroes and now persons relegated to obscurity are people who are memory-keepers of how the struggle transpired in the late 1980’s.


As protagonists, they speak about their experience and motivation for joining the resistance, and their stories and memories that continue to build an incredible narrative of the history of resistance against oppression as expressed by activists in Ikageng and the Western Transvaal during those time of the infamous State Of Emergency of 1986.

The documentary thus unearths some living activists of yesteryear, who have unfortunately been overlooked by the current democratic dispensation and its beneficiaries. 

Saturday, October 11, 2025

Nduduzo Makhathini

 

 

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.

Video Art And The Decline of “History”?

The word “history” came into being, because our events were told and written down thereafter. Now history is being recorded in images or vid...