"From Marikana Hill to Constitution Hill"- An exhibition by Pitika Ntuli

Pitika Ntuli – Some Works 

It is an unforgettable sight, the sculpture exhibition of Graphite, Bone and Found Metal Sculptures by the seminal poet and artist Pitika Ntuli at The Constitution Hill Women's Gaol. A significance on the artist's depiction of the figures places emphasis on what I can call ‘the historic temperament towards identity in modern Africa’. A constant dialogue between the technical proficiency of his sculptural craft and the metaphorical themes inherent in the various forms created is visible, taking on a symbiotic relationship that constructs a symbolization that is other worldly.

There is an undeniable spiritual dimension to any encounter with Pitika Ntuli's works, which often leaves ones' tongue soiled by residues of post-industrial experiences and histories. This constantly evolving theme, though often analysed from an academic point of view, is what draws most people to the art - whether informed about the arts in general or not. A form of accessibility which translates from this inadvertent spiritual connectivity alluded to is perhaps what made an impression on even the security guard who volunteered to take me around the prison compound. He was spell-bound by the artworks; from contorted faces emerging from hunched backs to humanoid wheelbarrows - this was something dense to digest. It all seemed like a dream, a séance with a clan of ancestral entities who gave a divine form to those deformed by perils assailing every soul that was and those that are to be - an invocation of spirits - a process so profoundly embedded in forms viscid with expressed joys, sometimes morbidity or other transcendent symbolic imagery.

The bone sculptures, the scale of which are beyond human (perhaps because they are at times elephant bones or other animal remains), took me on exploratory expeditions on ideas of a post-human evolution. Here I see a centuries-old tradition of abstraction in African art before the European colonial period, putting a stained mirror in front of ‘the present man’ showing the face of an afro-futuristic human metamorphic grotesquery. With facial expressions resembling visible appearances of an invisible inner self, their ghostly postures invoke a sense of looking into a post-apocalyptic purgatory, a world beyond the confines of a body’s ideas of pain and fear.

Yet, these elegantly figural compositions show the artist's dexterity in a light that even sober the viewer's mind. These works, I felt, "exorcised," anyone from fear of the unknown by giving form to it. For as the security guard informs me, the prison compound is a haunted place; where the spirits of those who faced the hang-pole still roam. He showed me places that night-watchmen dread to enter. So it was rather fitting that such haunting works of transformative sculpting be housed in a haunted coliseum of executions, where cries of political prisoners once echoed.

Then there are pieces which seem like assemblages of randomly found industrial materials whose geometric form is dictated by their inherent properties, such as wheelbarrows, shovels, various metallic mechanical parts welded together, or electronic transistors that become organs of a sacred biology abstracted here.
The results are gestures and attitudes of these zinc and steel sculpture are essentially performative, as though in an unknown expressive dance. Not similarly morbid with souls of the deceased in the expressions of the bony and bronze faces, but a metallic dance to a harmony in the last movements of a doomed civilization.

The dense tonal textures on the rusted skins of these automatons are what summons them eerily to life, while the bodies themselves depict geometric yet abstract idioms on reality in an innovative three-dimensional form.

It is my impassioned advice that anyone vaguely interested in sculptural arts pay a visit to this extensive exhibition, and be forever transformed by the poetry carved on bone and metal.

Pictures: Paul Zisiwe