Kasie Gallerised

Galleries are repositories of contemporary social memory, identity, and spiritual continuity. Although galleries have been traditionally enclaves of white privileged artists, and some of those artists of colour deemed palatable by the art market speculators, their character is finally facing transformation from outside.

Activating infrastructural change within under-resourced spaces like South Africa’s townships means a commitment to reshaping the structures of cultural institutions, where galleries and other heritage sites must advocate for reparative methodologies in the face of dispossession.

But how can artists explore and contend with the interplay between contemporary democratic erosion of free expression and post-truth aesthetics, while presenting these “unpolished” narratives through which not only objects but also emotions, memories, and ideas circulate?

Artist Lesego Moncho has pioneered the trend of bringing overlooked art to the people by establishing The Lesego MONCHO Art Gallery in Taung, a historic and politically important township on the outskirt of the North West Province, a town that is home to a rich legacy of artistic and literary activism.

His work as a gallerist is born from a desire for reciprocity of living artists, not to reduce artists to mere producers of objects, and as artist in his own right, Lesego recognises the hidden burdens of artistic labor, the stress and lack of financial support that often derails many artistic practices as they erode attentiveness and dedication.

The monumental work that goes into establishing an art gallery in a township must take resilience and dedication, that is why it was essential to engage the galleries on his theoretical approach to curating exhibition for audiences that were excluded from “cultural appreciation”.

When the art world is shifting with contemporary capitalist rivalries, the military-industrial machinery continues ravaging various symbols of heritage, artworks and painting will disappear from public access, and this will affect places where conditions for scarcity are entrenched into the social super-structure.

Black communities fall within the strata of social demographics with less access to cultural institutions, and this absence can and has create a form of an avoidance of the preservation of such institution, especially by people of colour.

Although there is a prolific history of resistance artists who created spaces for artistic expression within the confines of politically charged and monitored townships, South Africa has observed a decline of such collectives and movements.

A large number of these art collectives and hubs are now based in high end suburbs of metropolitan cities, where the creative market is lucrative and the purchasing power and palates for new art is further growing.

Contemporary galleries and artists alike are now embroiled in postcolonial and neocolonial dynamics that challenge authority and ownership, and for galleries like the Lesego MONCHO Art Gallery, restitution and decolonisation debates require rethinking collection policies and custodianship.

For artists from marginalised or formerly colonised social groups, galleries must move from ownership to stewardship, from possession to relation; this way artists will not imagine galleries as abstract machines of validation and instant monetary gratification.

These galleries must confront the ever morphing yet constant exclusion of these artists from dominant categories of value while avoiding the risk of being instruments appropriated by traditional cultural institutions seeking diversity optics.

And in a cultural climate where both galleries and artists adapt to chronic instability by normalising self-exploitation, and exhaustion, galleries like MONCHO Art Gallery represent a change of guard.

When new artists often slip into tokenism when they cultivate their social, gender, or cultural background for personal success, galleries like MONCHO can either exploit that trait or reimagine it.

And the Lesego MONCHO Art Gallery, it appears is determined to keep relations between artists open and transparent, ensuring that collaboration remains a civic practice rather than a bureaucratic procedure.

This art haven is a testament that unless artists orient their methods towards self-sustained expression and making accessibility to a broad audience a priority, they need robust ideas and the willingness to face the hardships of navigating an unequal terrain of the global art world.

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Images from the artist's online profiles.

Secret Messages of Flowers - On Pieter Robert Uitlander's Art

 

Algorithms tend to throw flowers at a flower child, and this I encountered when researching botanical depictions in arts, resulting in those obviously lusty snaps of framed canvases simulating impressionistic depiction of artists of past centuries.

As I probed further the impact of these ornamental flora, I became entranced by their language, as it became wildly popular within the domain of human romance and rituals associated with births and deaths.

So flowers, it seemed, situated the natural within human emotion, they adorned graves as symbols of remembrance, as nourishment for departed souls.

This imposed power is evident in Pieter Robert Uitlander’s PIENK HIBISCUS IN BLOU VAAS, a mournful portrait of a flower that seems to observe moments of death; like a companion for those about to depart the land of the living.

There’s a rich quietness in flowers he oils to canvas, that seem to reckon with the present, because they are always in a state of decay, wilting with each breath, a story laid out in colours that morph within eyes that glance and contemplate their transient beauty.

From the inception of Western painting, artists have depicted plants, flowers, and trees in images ranging widely in subject and purpose. And the use of botanical imagery in painting proliferated especially in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as artists became increasingly interested in the realistic depiction of objects from nature.

Robert’s flowers, on the other hand, are anguished, as if held captive in vases meant to savor their beauty. these bursting bouquets demonstrate how through his art he has honed an ability to freeze time and grant flowers eternal yet still life.

The flowers, spread across the table at a market place, for example, sinuously stare and punctuate the presence in the most of bustling pedestrians, who could be lovers vying for reciprocation of their sentiments.

A vase of flowers placed in front of portraits, flowers in a market where florists seems in frozen conversations, and many other radical renderings of flowers, including the personal, the decorative, the scientific, the painterly, the deliberately amateur yet un-witnessed in their splendour.

Although flowers have a simple purpose in nature: reproduction, their lure relies heavily on harmonious colors, soft curves, and symmetrical forms.

And standing among the best floral daubers of our time, his work chronicles unintended or unattended still lifes, that remind viewers of the fleeting nature of “Beauty”; the beauty of wilting flowers, the beauty of time itself; time which observed with invisible lenses of memory entwined with emotion.

Traced in the atmospheric floral patterns are remnants of memories of lived moments immortalized in petals, blooms gathering for their intensely allergenic qualities, moments that beckon one to ash: where, for what, and by whom these flowers were cultivated.
 
And there are lone flowers, lingering forlornly as symbolic motifs to process, expressing complex emotions tied to significant life events of beginnings and endings.

Images From The Artist's Online Profiles 

Can Museums Be For Social Healing?

“An uncompromising clarity of vision in art carriers spiritual, political and ecological meaning.”

Our world is shaped by overlapping global crises, social upheaval and political disruption, with growing societal fragmentation and isolation intensified by rapid technological advancements and an economic system that fosters inequality.

And to address pressing questions of representation, institutional critique, and the possibilities of reimagining the museum from within, museums need kinds of experimental pockets, spaces that get torn down and rebuilt conceptually, again and again. 

The work and spaces must call for sustained, systemic self-criticism as a moral imperative, despite the inherent contradictions and potential for failure, reflecting on the changes of human behaviour—from the banality of evil to complicity and indifference.

With the colonial aphasia of our country’s  imperial past, continues the project by exposing racism and before and after apartheid, and culminates in a response to depicting how the atrocities of the war against colonialism, white supremacist nationalism, racism, and capitalism remain inextricably intertwined within the present reality.

Evidently, ideological violence against black histories and subjectivities enriches artistic languages of dissent and deepens intercultural approaches to restitution of immense social ills that are refracted through concepts articulated through various collections in museums and galleries.

Walking through colonial museums is an artistic and political act, one that fosters contemplation and connection within the chaos of the worlds we inhabit; worlds that unfold across the museum spaces, guides memory through themed environments that aim to enchant even as they unsettle.

At this juncture in the heated debate around representation of erased identities within museums, can artists explore uneasy questions around the commodification of historical trauma through mass-tourism experiences?

When we map each city’s iconic landmarks, tracing the emotional and sensory textures of contemporary life, one notices a thriving intercultural dynamism that is both commemorative of shared experiences and trauma. These spaces also afford opportunities fo healing.

The complexities of continuity of cultural heritage, craft, and artisanship—including sites and practices across the country that are under threat require interventions from the same museums which claim to be harbingers of hope for an unexpected future of museums.

And by foregrounding censored local cultural histories through the revival of craft practices and the preservation of the region’s globally-important material heritage, these spaces can device new ways of engaging with the past and its traumatic emblems; with a sense of inquisitiveness and resolve.

These new spaces, coordinated by inspired curators, can continue to support the need to generate new narratives, advocate for transparency as options for a fluid and associative approach that mirrors the very nature of contemporary artistic and preservatory practice.

These new museums are thus not conceived as dead sammelsuria of documents, artefacts and paintings, but as a permeable, shifting structure—shaped by the practices it holds and continually transformed through engagement

Unlike traditional museums, the new spaces should cease to be the bizarre repositories of complex memories but spaces that extend into the archival realm, exploring how archives can hold memory to account, not only as traces or as records but also as “objects or subjects” still unfolding—forms that resists capture yet persists.

Part of the evolving roles of such institutions in shaping cultural memory, is inviting artists to consider archives not as a closed system, but as permeable sites—where the past is in motion and the performative continues to unfold

French philosopher Jacques Rancière (b. 1940), understood art not simply as tools of artistic production, but as a “sensory milieu”—an environment that reshapes how we perceive and experience the world as a multilayered space for thought that expands the boundaries of perception and awareness.

When we begin to view and hear these artefacts as subjects on equal footing with humans, adorning them with human qualities of wisdom, strength of will and all traits of cunning intelligence, we must therefore begin raising questions about how people affect and reshape the meanings of these artefacts, sculptures, into archival knowledge.

As battlefields occupied by the living and the dead, curators of these reimagined museum spaces must engage in new dialogues with recent acquisitions and animate the ghosts that accompany and haunt our present, through processes where history and memory converge.

There is a need for new heroism that is not centred around colonial personalities and events; a re-evaluation of human rights violations lorded s acts of victory by settlers, their plunder of indigenous lands should be viewed from the lens of social displacement on a scale that was never hear of.

To counteract the idea of sculptural monumentality enjoyed by the many gladiatorial monstrosities of colonial adoration, these canonised idols of power need to be re-viewed without filters of nationalism and biases of culture dominate. 

That eternally cowering gaze of the native towards imperial artefacts should be dissolved through archeologically rigorous research and authentication of events, names attached to heroisms of the past; an open-mindedness that fosters sensitivity toward social issues with conflicting perspectives.

These figures require a new eye to perceive beyond the veils of purported power, to reveal the sycophantic desires of European low caste personages who found bounty to plunder in far off lands, tracing their subtle yet startling connections to political, social and popular demonisation of indigenous persons.

And this project requires a visual language that serves to unburden the representation of marginalised bodies within the colonial milieu; unfaltering the colonisers’ gazes for a vivid and unprejudiced view of the human-ness of the subjugated.

The new museums for new imaginaries becomes each artist's site in a multidimensional way, a space where individual artists’ cultural backgrounds and sensory languages intersect, their works unfolding as ongoing processes.

If The Land Was A Man - On The Art Of Thokozani Mthiyane

Spanning painting, sculpture, performance, and installation, Thokozani’s commitment to historically situated and locally sourced materials addresses the complexities of continuity of cultural heritage within the contested “South Africa” identity.

Mthiyane, whose work playfully subverts traditional art- and exhibition-making, is a Johannesburg based artist who is largely influenced by his time spent under the tutelage of artists Sfiso KaMkame and Thami Jali. 

And undeniably, his work’s evolution has brilliantly underscored the profound contributions of many other South African artists in the visual arts, and by fusing painting and poetry with artistic flare, his language has probed a variety of compelling social incompetencies.

And scanning through his profiles on social media one finds a kaleidoscope of works, once is confronted by a plethora or images of his artworks, making one yearn for an opportunity to visit the artists studio.

He once asserted that his works are only premeditated up to maybe the first gesture. This is a trait the lurks throughout his seeming unfinished and self-finishing works.

Taking a glance at his sculptures, some seem crude yet transcendent, intertwining material and immaterial elements, creating a space where the visible and the invisible collide, offering an encounter that is at once immediate, uncanny, are transcendent and mind-boggling.

A nuanced analysis is needed to provide further insights into his many reflections on social issues, and his disobedience to the status quo is an affective and ethical stance—an act of repair within the damaged self-reflective world of black artistic practice often strangled by economic expectations and philosophical crudity.

Works such IF THE LAND WAS A MAN, Umzabalazo Womphefumulo, Isiphambano nomqhele wameva, how they reimagine the crucifix,  invoke a spiritual contradiction as many associate the cross as an emblem of salvation not oppression subjugation.

We confront paintings documenting spiritual themes picturing worshippers and their revered holy figures juxtaposed with an alternative abstraction steeped in a multitude of historical references; works that unsettlingly interrogate the politics and power dynamics implied by the yoke, symbolic of how religion has become for black people. 

Among his haunting sculptures are two which I have titled The Bone Machine (reminiscent of Tom Waits and his work as both musician poet and artists dabbling in various expressive techniques.

There is another that resembles THE HEART and another sculpture he titled Portrait (v), and one wonders if these are self-portraits. One such portraits done the severed dreadlocks that were a feature of Thokozani’s inner persona.

Ukubika komphefumulo exhibits an impulsive spirit yet intensely edgy and drawing on threads of the unknowable designs of chance, and what emerges is a frames of sundered materials (pieces of stretched skin) turning turned blue by either the cold or decay.

Without taking the artistic process too lightly and detracting from its value in the context of deep exploration and self-expression, each piece a true expression of artistic individuality rooted in simplicity and spontaneity.

At his exhibitions, Mthiyane always causes a thrill among the audience, a performer and poet who is always keen on inferring textual and vocal anecdotes. 

Besides his basic ideas, selection of topics and motifs, Mthiyane continues choose specific elements of art in addition to techniques and ways of composing paintings, his studio has become a place for the formation of unique workshops where artists, poets and musicians exchange experiences and inspire each other.

Although his art might seem to have began due to pure idleness, his is a concerted method creating unique hybrids of self-reflection and observations of the world’s hidden character.

Over time, his canvases grew to possess a certain individual artistic maturity and a clearly unique formula which is easily perceived; from metaphors of grief, symbols of contrition on disproportional figures in a specific setting rather realistically.

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Images From The Artist's Profiles 

DADA or what???

Once asked about their artistic ethos, Cape Town based artist Dada Khanyisa emphasised that they are “interested in social dynamics, how people relate, how they engage, how they choose to present themselves, who they choose to have around them, and the places they choose to occupy. 

And when multi-disciplinary artist won THE 2022 FNB ART PRIZE, anyone who had been following their career with cynicism paid astute attention. 

After a walk through the exhibition held at The Johannesburg Art Gallery  in early 2024, the nuanced assemblages, collaged three-dimensional backdrops that incorporate found objects and architectural references, which are the signature of this renowned artist left an indelible mark on my psyche. 

Addressing minimal artistic gestures—there is  a selection of sculptures which I found intriguing, as they are at times rendered in the sleek three dimensions of a printed surfaces that only enhances the illusion of life with its sheen of escapist glamour.

Often taking their departure from from physical gestures of revolt to invisible architectures of codes of sexual identities, the work reflects on nostalgia and memories of bygone times in township love life, oscillating between revelation and erasure of those loved lives.

With titles like “iNkosi ibenathi in these polyamorous streets and between the sheets”, ‘eBree” and eBumnandini” and ‘uMpako” “aBomama bom’gidi”, Dada continually reflects on community and its varied members, the mothers, the lovers who meet a world in turmoil over sexual identity.

Depicting jovial scenes of friends pulled from street scenes, these artworks, each is a record of life in the hollow squaller of squatter camps or inner city slums.

The resolve to alcohol abuse that is characteristic of South African youth culture is also brought to the fore and questioned against other depredations of a hostile world where many reside.

Dada’s refusal to be boxed in by medium or artistic expectation, has liberated their creative practice from the stranglehold of consumer trends.

Their art might serves a social function by depicting events, situations and moments in which persecuted individuals can take refuge and form on their creative reconfiguration to serve the bodies that are bound by them.

The sculptural paintings that have become a signature style, have invoked mixed reaction from art community prone to market logic.

But can their practice become its own genre, and a creation of alternative forms of intimacy among people of diverse social origins?

Images from Artist Profiles.

New Imagineers or Naïve Art?

The consequences of internet proliferation of art has become a stark reality faced by artists working on the margins of the mainstream art market. 

These artists are often people of colour, working in improvisational media and multiple disciplines, renewed artists rekindling new flames of tradition rather than preserving tradition as static heritage.

Although the internet purports to be a global gallery where one can be introduced to diverse artists from vastly different scopes of artistic practice, but there are few of those who resonate with some inner chord for appreciating and seeing creativity for the messages it transmits.

 

 

And reading about the APY Art Centre Collective in recent article tackling a scandal about appropriation of indigenous art by white patrons, I was interested to acquaint myself with the work from the collective.

In the world of contemporary art with its endless variety of trends and movements, what I experienced was a kind of naive art that occupies a special place, a bridge connecting traditional art forms with modern movements.

 

Debates in the art historical community are heated about unschooled and self-taught artists and their practices, deeming their art as incapable of deep transformation of art. 

But this art movement often construed as Primitivism,  borrows visual forms from non-Western or prehistoric peoples, and is recognized by the state of the spirit, a pure soul of the artist, reflection of his/her feelings. 

Before the 20th century, in its most basic sense, the so-called “naive art” was any form of visual art created by a person who lacked the formal education and training a professional artist undergoes. 

When a trained artists emulates this aesthetic, it is often referred to as primitivism, pseudo-naive art or faux naive art.

Now, seeing the works of indigenous Australian artists like Helen Curtis and Iluwanti Ken, one observes how their often “naive art” often ignores the rules of perspective. 

 

The act of “seeing” is transformed into “being within” that with is seen, and perchance “that which is seen” is transformed into the seer guiding and ever transforming view.

Often characterized by a lyrical treatment of their environments and the poetic rendering of mythological and historical subjects, their work touch on the spiritual without being escapist. 

Although their practices seemingly necessitate exclusion, where they gain power through their insularity and a cultivated need for protection from other ideas, these artists nevertheless create compositions based on their inner perceptions, not on academic norms and standards.

 

Their art could easily be dismissed as art that’s created by people who “don’t know what they’re doing”, but that undermines the raw creativity found within works of the movement and its uninhibited and instinctive approach to materials, composition and ideas. 

Theirs are reverent thoughts rooted in personal histories, language and storytelling, involved in contemplation of belonging, loss, memory, with consequent trauma experienced by those whose psyches have been re-arranged.

Their consequent images portray inherited memories to tell personal stories that have been long silenced, affirming continuity between sediments of memory and the present, redressing unresolved ideological conflicts that constantly recur.

 

Their radical ethos, political and aesthetic engagement emanating from their artistic practices in the face of constant erasure by the art community; mediates their practices and the participatory dimensions undertaken, revealing how their existence manifests a radical form of presence in which body, environment, and time enter into immediate relation.

Like some sensible apostles of “a new objectivity”, these artists continue to pave renewed paths for approaching art in ways that trends and proper form ignores, and while conventional success is desired, a less inhibited way of working is encouraged.

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Images by: APY Arts Center Collective (Adelaide, Australia)

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