Video art presents a critical reassessment of the screen; a simple display surface that has evolved into an active and generative membrane through which speculative realities are constructed.
And as the screen, or projection spaces, are becoming mediums of interfacing with with synthetic and virtual environmental conditions; artists are producing new conditions of experiencing these realities.
It has evolved into an art form that requires specific perceptive regime in which seeing is mediated via the screen; where introspective projections of marginal stories at risk of disappearance, reappear in new forms, carrying new meanings.
But is there a deliberate repression of video art history within continental cultural remembrance and pedagogical discourse?
Are there video artists with distinct material compositions and visual grammar grounded in perception, intuition, and ideological inquiry into the symbolisms and myths of colonial representation of bother the settler and the oppressed (from whom imagery is extracted for exhibition of conquest)?
Today, publications that open cultural discourse are more important than ever, to address various ways in which heritage and social realities of the past have been preserved to serve certain dominant narratives while overlooking, if not erasing, other subaltern perspectives on the same realities.
And recollections of these erased narratives also entails finding ways of creating a new urges of stories that promote solidarity in these uncertain times, fostering regenerative ways of remembering the past while being members of the present and future.
The article asks how historical violence continues to resonate in post-colonial artistic practices, and explores the potential of inter-generational and transnational dialogue for a pluralist remembrance that offers orientation for the future generations of video artists.
By presenting an encounter between moving image, sound, historic collections, and archives as a site of projecting memory, its preservation, and potential resurrection, the polemic here, challenges stereotypes and deconstructs romanticised myths about people of colour and Video/Film-Art.
This is a personal analysis of where images and narratives converge in a practice driven by a constant pursuit of freedom, transformation, and complexity.
With constantly evolving techniques, the artists mentioned in this piece use “samples” motifs from art and cultural histories, linking them to current issues, tracing both the visible and invisible forces that shape civic life, particularly for the lives of African people.
Bringing contemporary cinematic art into a poetic and sensorial dialogue with the architecture of disparate memories, their personal inquisitive natures propose an unorthodox gesture of memory while presenting a methodological counterpoint to traditional historiography through film/video art.
This article examines works of a number of prominent southern African video/film artists trafficking in cross-cultural interdisciplinary practices, as they expose the grit and perversions that have created the myth of western personal freedom and its depravity of constant dehumanisation.
And considering the tensions between transience of the mediums of film and video art, and the impermanence of its subject matter; collating the remaining traces, presenting them as archives, are methods of contending with their disappearance and erasure from the annals of contemporary African artistic expression.
Nandipha Mntambo
A drifter through a vacant bull ring, a female matador in complete regalia composed yet on edge, sword in hand aimed at the unknown awaiting.
These were some images that clung to my mind when watching Ukungenisa, presented at Big Fish School Of Digital Filmmaking, by renowned film producer, David Max Brown.
Ukungenisa (2009) is the kind of work, a performed trance that impels one to consider ideas of transplantation of identity through animalism and multi-cultural exposure that occurs abstractly and through physical proximity to animals at moments of their death.
As she meanders through a vacant coliseum as in an echo of a dream; femininity in a masculine territory, a metaphor and an invasion of seclusionist traditions - this performance video art is about womanhood, following a rhythmic trance to escape and defiantly slaying mythic beasts of patriarchal privilege.
Blurring dichotomies between the animal and the human, protecting and harming; the scenario starting with the ritual of preparation; the film-art presents an interrogation of western mythology in African contexts, where even entire bloodlines are descendant from the animus.
Placing herself in the midst of the politics of erased beings and those to be erased (bakwaNkomo), to make visible their invisibility as a fighter who heals while brutalising, Nandipha captivates with her robust energy, and a mysticism that is both foreign and dear, akin the slaughtering of a sacred cow for an ancestral libation.
She often spoke of her work being entwined with myths and archetypes from ancient cultures, this trait gives her approach to skinning and using cow hides in human form, a timeless and macabre texture for reflecting on concepts of lactation/birth in relation to death/loss of identity as symbolised in the duel.
Cattle in the myth of the matador are nourishing entities turned violent and enraged, who in turn are massacred in worship and sacrifice. so, is this ceremonial performance responding to vast histories of the Moorish traditions as they eventually evolved into the Spanish cosmology?
Often taking on the hides of cattle to enclose her human form, Nandipha undergoes a metamorphosis; a transformation into a Minotaur (a human with a bull’s head) provides a anthropomorphic hue, a ferocity that symbolises femininity in violent confrontation with “the Gods” and a fated existence of domestication.
And recalling the myth of ancient Minoans of a white bull given by the sea, a beast of such beauty that a king (Minos) refused to slaughter - how it became an anathema and the queen’s fiery love that yielded an ungodly birth; UKUNGENISA seems to hint at a confrontation with the bestial urges that breeds monstrosities in humanity.
The film examines, in a choreographic exploration, how the mythic entities that lurks in diverse global cultures is constantly rehearsed in various social auditoria and enacted with intent on bodies of women deemed as animalistic by nature of their nurture.
Does this creature become a hybrid form that emerges through power and violence?
But does hunting this bull of heaven (or the sea) to offer its heart to the gods or ancestors suffice as an ideal for sanctification of the mortal sins committed before the divine?
Though UKUNGENISA, as an attempt to grasp the mysteries of the matador, Nandipha provides a generated vision where the beast is purportedly slain in an act similar to that of being milked.
A state of fragility that is both vulnerable yet threatening; and transcends.
Her performance driven film/video art proposes a new way of perceiving relationships between animality and spirituality; seeing the transcendent in the visible, beyond the complex self-perception imposed by external narratives.
Communication as transmitted through gestures, the primal urgency interacting with the unknown frequency known for its violence; the bull that never materialises in a world left desolate with remnants of echoes of bleeding and conquest.
The environment, a cathedral of executions flanked by a rostrum as the edge of instinct; a biological defence crumbling in the face of the unknown.
Gradually moving the space, venturing into an world unobserved and its blood soaked soil bringing the inevitable to pass in an enigmatic rhythm that dances at peril; Nandipha transforms the Eurocentric mythology on its horns to blow the sordid dust of colonial coliseums into dances of the undefeated.
Jyoti Mistry
Can our vigilant ancestry intervene in the technocratic present of machine religions and new age spirituality that purports to heal traumas of legitimate origin?
How does the person become affected by ancestral pain and its transmission throughout generations? What are the inherent poetics of memory that are suckled from our grandmothers; populated by grandfatherly trees and tales old as roots?
These are some questions that mould the mystery of Mistry’s films and the enigma they possess.
As a lecturer in Film at various international institutions, her research oriented practice is a complex excavation of both personal and collective memory in light of political developments in post-independence Africa.
Her presentations and installations, as well as experimental documentary work, reinvigorates ideas of hybrid identities and diasporic fragments found in music and arts of disparate communities divorced from their African origins.
The “witch” as a key figure in ancient literary imagination, has endured numerous afterlives in much of contemporary literature and artistic representations. Yet, this figure, infused with interpretative paradoxes, has been indelibly obscured in contemporary memory.
In CAUSE OF DEATH, womanhood, patriarchal dread and ever repeated accusations of witchery are metaphors of the perpetual subjugation of the feminine mystic.
Traumatic memories of gendered suspicion and oppression are exorcised, and redressed through visuals infused with Napo Masheane’s poetry, where engaging with issues of spectacles of representations of women’s death, Jyoti linkshistorical imagery of historical persecutions to contemporary forms of resistance as expressed in Napo’s poetic spell of words that translates and resuscitate spirits of women drowned ”by the land” and crucified for the land.
The stake bearing a resemblance of an unorthodox crucifix, a figure strapped by the wrists and flames devouring their wailing posture; an x-rayed analysis of the innermost essence of the tortured body and the torture itself, addresses both the overt and subtle violence effected on the feminine body.
And as the film-art compels the “remembrance of this spectacle”, the burning female body remains a vehicle for projecting the most scathing of memories of bodies subjected to condemnation; femicide and its unbearable psychological violence, denounced as an atrocity without reproducing a spectacle of the
canalisation of the feminine.
The grandmother’s warm bed has been a space of intimacy and listening, augmented by scents and odours that linger in memories that are often rekindled as emotional registers, could possibly have retained her soul at those hours of her return to vulnerability in death.
Yet, each bed knows its occupants eternal thoughts and essence, their energy entwined with fabrics and sheets that had bound generations of descendants, with a wholesome nurture of love.
LOVING IN BETWEEN proposes such inter-generational intimacy, where aged memories commingle with meditative observations of the decay of “ the memory of the elders”, a form of sacrifice of treasures embedded in genes, memories raging through the living and young.
The bed as a devotional locus for vulnerability and maternal relationships between bodies divorced by age, a surrender that is lost; a device for listening and memory created through participatory companionship.
Asserting a compelling engagement with the present, Jyoti’s works rewrite personal histories, in which autobiographical experiences intertwine with memory, breaking with the linearity of time while assigning new meaning to wounds of forced absences and dislocations from loved ones.
Her film art echos of lost futures and past dreams used to predict a present that could bear a just and responsible humanity respectful of heritage, history and the idea of origins.
Nathaniel Stern
In a post-truth era of deep fakes and artificially intelligent and augmented virtual realities populated by avatars, how is art perfecting the subtle disappearance of reality, where deception and illusion are the sole means of interfacing with the world around?
Balancing the express seriousness of a scientists concerned about networked and virtual worlds, and exploring cinematic dimensions of the internet as a tool for merging reality and the virtual, Nathaniel Stern collaborates with computer experts, programmers, to repurpose existing residues of discarded gadgets, as a response to human interactions with “their reality”.
We watch animations displayed on etched screens, superimposed to lend a three dimensionality to an interactive reality emerging from his manipulated constellations of imaginary; the frames being light emitting portals so to speaks, opening onto psychic archives of man dreaming he was a machine.
His networked ecosystem and their polished characters (players) caught in loops of performances of virtual selves, immerses one in a fluctuating world of colour, juxtaposed with intimations about how humanity yearns to automate itself into interactive and modular scenarios.
These new dimensions, the inhuman gestures and atmospheres oscillating between mathematical order and optical disruption, become tactile, programmed projections of utopian reveries; revealing a performative potential that can entrance the human mind away from the burdens of reality.
Nathaniel’s work as a philosophical inquiry, seeks to uncover how reality can be distinguishable from the virtual and the possible, when the mere act of creating these realities is an extractive force that transforms the planet for the worst.
Here, the convergence of technology and art as a scientific experiment shed light on their entangled relations, critiquing how technological advancements disregard the environmental degradation that follows.
Perhaps that is why Nathaniel tends to utilise varied materials to augment his dynamic practice; reworked drawings on projection surfaces, or silk screened images that create a multi-dimensionality - all disparate methods are employed to questions the origins of technology’s superiority over life, and extractive lifespan that adds to waste culture.
His films view computing as weaving a complex future, processing an inseparable digital layer to the illusion of superiority of humanity over nature; thus generating a space for a counter-narrative to the dominant ideology of world domination through trans-human efforts.
Berni Searle
Berni’s work disrupts habitual notions that old architectures is solely symbolic of decay; implying that buildings, landscapes are as entities imbued with spirits, life and tales.
In SUBTERFUGE, architecture is storyteller, its silence and absence of human occupation implicit of its inherently and independently born spirit; where spaces are constantly breathing souls and memories.
Tracking shots and drone footage provide a spirit’s view over dystopian architecture of The Castle, a significant monolith of colonial oppression; and this fluid re-entry into the past, induces a contemplation of that which was, yet remains.
And within the emptiness that is a mere camouflage of a violent turmoil at a spiritual level, herein are enclosed within these serenely built reinforcements, lamenting hordes of slain slaves and failed by a forgetting past and amnesiac present.
The employ of the artist’s denuded body as witnessed in her seminal performances is a symbol and thematic inference to selflessness, induced by human confinement; a solitude suffered within surreal settings and its imageries bred from traumatised psychologies like echoes activated from the present.
In MOONLIGHT, themes of informal labour and the furnaces of dislocation, and the profound changes brought about by post-apartheid South Africa, reveal the transforming nature of socio-economic structures but also the lasting marks of landscapes and ways of life, the failures of the promise of progress and self-realisation.
At the junk yard the circulation of bodies and resources, and extraction of resources by bodies that are also resource commodities; play a metaphoric trick on the spectacle of recycling what is discarded.
The persons obscured by neglect and social disdain, relegated to the margins of the unseen; these garbage collectors aren’t mere performers in guises of poverty but entities shaped by everyday action of many Berni’s contemplative piece, filmed from an extreme low-angle address notions of inferiority of the bodies, when seeking the value in obsolescence that drives and sustain consumer culture.
This act of capturing an event reflecting on the post-apartheid promises of that continue to structure the current social absurdities and inequities; MOONLIGHT, and its time lapsed conception of temporality proves the that their tale will outlast he extractive logic of the empire within which they existed.
Her continued confrontation with the status quo when lucidly crafting art about and against colonial privilege, has been exemplary among those artists who have concerned themselves with addressing the lack of equilibrium in human life,between the personal and the public.
Retracing past histories as a way to disturb established narratives that largely ignores the brutality that seeped into the walls with blood and tears, and wails; restoring dignities of souls animating the unfinished colonial violence witnessed at THE CASTLE as site of contemporary tourist leisure.
Simon Gush
As most African post-independence epochs are marked by the profound sociopolitical tensions that preceded liberation for many African communities, and artists like Simon Gush, as active intellectuals within distraught societies, manifestly reflect and ponder the complex and maintained ties with colonial trauma.
Winner of the Ernest Cole Award 2022, Gush continues a hybrid, research-driven practice that spans photography, video and installation, interrogating socio-political crises of the twentieth century against the backdrop of exploited persons and communities, bringing history into vivid dialogue with film/video art.
In THE COMPANY OF, a study on the joys and anguish of alienation in lives of immigrants is depicted through a football match on railway tracks (a force of migration and displacement), where immigrants (as extracted bodies) are heard jovially speaking varied languages in a purported serenity of a “new life in exile”.
Executed meticulously in response to contemporary political crises facing foreigner in European metropoles, Gush explores nostalgic expressions in space marked by constant departures and arrivals; where desperate eventualities challenge human empathy and morality.
Themes of cultural assimilation and exile are tackled playfully through a game that often unites while pitting men against one another; a ball as the centre of a universe, players becoming fictional entity divorced from others by their mere displacement and foreignness.
His film/video art tends to employ documentary attention tailored to reflect on multiple meanings of happenings, welcome of otherwise; confronting trauma caused by uprooted memories never to be reclaimed, and the rapid fragmentation of identities in the face of global forces such as war, famine and the overall displacement environments of origins.
Simon Gush is one such contemporary visual artist working across media to unravel ideas and trauma; whose research work informs projects, from conceptual installations based on archives to documentary observations, all developed through interdisciplinary approaches to knowledge.
Artists like Simon Gush, as active intellectuals within distraught societies, manifestly reflect and ponder the complex notions of inherited heritage and the poetics of memory; unraveling the maintained ties with colonial trauma within post independence contexts, using contemporary themes and aesthetic interpretations of the darker magic of a circus of a present wearing thin.
Bogosi Sekhukhuni
Interactive, virtual landscapes, characterised by surreal imagery, and constructed scenography of costumed figures; Bogosi’s works question one’s relationship with subconsciousness, and possibly the unconscious occurrences that occupy spaces between zeros and ones.
From digital debris and other coded discarded nodes of algorithms, bands out a chorus of strange but intriguing figures and multicoloured forms on forays through two dimensional planes.
In the case of virtuality in his art, one might wonder who holds the camera, or rather,who paints with codes and algorithms? And for who; and what remains visible and invisible within the frames beyond the vessels of machine memory?
Oscillating between mathematical order and optical disruptions and obsessions, Bogosi’s art employs triggered vocalisations, gestures and pseudo-facial expressions rousing and posing, to expose stereotypes embedded and coded in emotions and reactions of viewers.
All these digital environments populated with computer-generated images in immersive worlds, algorithmic image generation, are all forms of re-configuring forms of subjectivity and how we perceive them across time, restating thought onto the varied stages of inventive virtual life’s narratives.
And as he turns virtual absences of sound into poetic gestures, geometric abstractions into patterns forming in an unexpected continuum; jolted performances into moments of outraged visibility, creating binary ghosts that yearn to be seen, Bogoshi Sekhukhuni’s art jostles with themes identity in a world where hybridity is the normative form of assembling the self.
His artificially generated art serves as a tool for producing imaginary environments, generating forms of illusions, and perfecting mechanism that sustain desires shaping humanity’s understanding of reality.
Lerato Shadi
The feminine gaze has become an essential vantage point from which many artists plunge into contested waters of female representation in art; an art that prioritises and presents womanhood in its full and unadulterated sensibilities and nuances, without patriarchal infamy.
Consequentially, Interpreting historical audio-visual recordings from the country’s past become Lerato Shadi’s starting point, as she transform these into living archives.
Lerato has over the years become such a voice that continues to garner popularity among the young and burgeoning feminist school of thought emerging on the fringes of a society rent by masculine violence, claiming visibility in a world invisibility of women as essential.
An in these inadmissible time characterised by the unfathomable violence against women and gender neutral persons, her voice grapple with an uncertain future for black women in South Africa and across the world.
Through her multifaceted practice that includes painting, sculpture, video art and photography, Shadi’s work unfurls the myriad tapestries of a contested space where the erasure of womanhood still persist in forms of artificialization, commodification and domestication.
The monotony in the video installation titled Selukgilwe, for example, presents knitting (ashore associated with female labour) as a method of weaving time and its mundanity in the rituals of everyday life.
She is immersed in an intense ritual guided by intuition and traditional skill which precede the idea at hand. Driven by a physical commitment to in pursuit of what she sees as the mundanity of monotony, a powerful critique emerges against socialised acceptance of women as charter slaves.
With a raw emotional intensity that exudes vulnerability, with resistance on its surface, Shadi’s works asks if the impoverishment of manners evident in western etiquette makes African womanhood uncultured and uncouth for appreciation and admiration?
Delving into her ancestors’ histories through the lens, Lerato’s work tracks lineages that resonate with peacemakers and diviners; in which autobiographical experiences merge with a broader reflection on socio-historical memory.
Sib Lamer Shongwe
Sibs Lamer Shongwe has worked hard to increase the visibility and acceptance of experimental films within the South African art scene with his Whitman Gallery, and audiences have welcomed his curatorial and film/video work with an ever deepening inquisitiveness, as he always challenges the norms and conventions of traditional cinema.
From the despondence of an affluence generation fed up with reclusive tendencies fueled by binges of narcotics and sedatives, Sib makes narrative observations of an insider; capturing the rotted smack vomited on designer couches of suburban disillusionment.
NECKTIE YOUTH is a testament of youth gone off the rails and frenzied dreams turning into nightmares, and highway traffic drones synthesised into soundtracks of hedonistic self-destruction.
Sib’s pictorial depictions of urbanity lends itself to Harmonie Korine’s haunting imagery of the everyday city and suburban docile life, translated into intimate moments rooted in the fundamental conditions of earthly experiences - life and death, love and loss; suburban luxury turned into stagnation and confinement.
