Through The Hour Darkly

 Images By: Paul Zisiwe

Lovelo

Tallish and languid of walk, with a charm that disarms, tinged with a seemingly detached demeanor, Lovelo is graceful in her stride, composing her robust gait with innocence.

A full smile when harmed is raided by even teeth lined like pearls behind lips on a face bearing strong slim yet rounded features serenely sculptured at birth.

Concealing pride perhaps, she speaks less, and her silence can be an exquisite torture.

While at times affable, generous and lively with her touch, during those rare occasions, her self-assured persona melts to give way to a stylish joviality.

Her waist fleshing firmly in a sway of lightly pronounced hips, on her light feet she waltzes with an inner calm, her eyes are always sparkling and offsetting all mysterious dispositions brooding in her frank mind.

Thickset eyes that often seem wounded, at times a cheerless smile intrudes her face, her breath a soft wind over hills of her breasts.

A mane rests on her skull, drooping threads of black-coiled hair streaming in a flood towards her silent navel.

 

She at joy soars above any black abyss of disappointed dreams like a flower dancing in the wind’s brace, her humming filling rooms with milky light.

Ambushed in a dream her lover withers among frozen ponds of her absence, and only her arrival will shoulder his ashen face that wept through false sunsets and sunrises.

The Dispossessed Through Mirrored Lenses

A NEW COUNTRY/DYING FOR GOLD

Mirror lenses in a nutshell are compact telescopes, mainly based on mirrors rather than glass and they are tools for capturing images, moving or static. 

Yet the expression speaks adequately to a mode of perception that is not refractive but reflective and that which somehow penetrates limits of our optics and involves our inner reflections on a public plane. 

Film, as a craft employs lenses to in fact “shoot and capture”, and based on this premise, any analysis of works made by self-reflective audio-visual practitioners should be viewed yet another mirrored gaze.

And over the past claustrophobic year, this becomes crucial when contemplating two radically political and aesthetically charged documentary films that left an indelible mark on my psyche, first because of their subject matters, and secondly, the filmmakers’ treatment of their narrative.

By some unfathomable serendipity, Richard Pakleppa and Catherine Meyburgh’s DYING FOR GOLD, an indictment on the genocidal practices that founded and sustained the South African mining industry, came into my radar together with Sifiso Khanyile’s A NEW COUNTRY, an intuitive analysis of the psychology of a nation disillusioned by its falsified past and fictitious present.

These two films seemed to possess disharmonic narratives, woven into a somewhat discordant nature of polarized mirrors through which each filmmaker perceived their world of the story. 

The first, giving sight of the origins of inter-generational tyranny that is the mining industry, and the second, its manifest consequences as seen through the eyes of a new generation claiming the gains of a demoralized nation.

The stories seem to continue a thread of ruin and exploitation, Dying For Gold providing a historical critique, which is the cause of the present disharmony of a new democratic dream, while A New Country questions the authenticity of freedom in light of exploitation without tangible and quantifiable reparations.

One film traces the destruction of black family units and the other traces evidence of ruined identities resulting from dislocation felt by children of the dispossessed, and together they narrate a unspoken genocidal history that continues unabated even today.

DYING FOR GOLD pivots on centralizing voices of the aggrieved and decentralizing institutional voices of exploitative enterprises and churning illicit truths of their brutal machinations that brought generations to their knees. 

A film that intricately dissects blisters of bruised bones, lungs and souls of mine workers and their families, providing evidence of inhumane nonchalance to black misery meted out by imperialist corporate voices spying from lofty offices.

Hostels are visibly designed like prisons to house men who volunteered for their servitude, cramped testosterone in cubicles packed with cement bed posts under asbestos roofing.

But what becomes of their children and wives, one might ask?

A surgical display of a racist lens that viewed blacks as sub-human, which is the dominant view the affluent white minority held when devising schemes of dispossession of land and possession of black bodies is boldly provided through clinical statistical data provided through audio archives of secret meetings and correspondences.

Through aerial shots of mining infrastructure, giving an air of observation from above, not interrupting the dignity of those denuded by poverty and rampant disregard for human sanctity, DYING FOR GOLD delves into intimate interviews with concerned persons whose livelihoods have been irreparably shattered.

And this perspective of invisible purveyors of power adds mystery to the blatant disdain for black masses entrenched through exploitative labor practices.

***

I constantly wonder why the urge to view the two films felt imperative, and after thoroughly engaging with their subject matter from the vantage point of a people steeped in disparate poverty resultant from well-sustained inequalities.

In Dying For Gold, voices of parents who felt the brunt of dispossession and lamentations of those herded to migrant labor camps are prominent narrators of the effects, while inversely in A New Country, voices echoed through lips of latter generations of those dispossessed as living victims of an ongoing imperialist project that leaves black folk disoriented by perpetual servitude.

 

In Dying For Gold are slovenly bodies with maimed dreams speaking innocently of their shattered present lives, in A New Country their children analytic of the slave purgatories that sundered their familiar bonds.

Like two mirrors facing each other, the films reflect two generations facing each other’s tainted realities, and the consequent disorientation that eclipses basic morality. 

The two films, viewed as mirrored lenses on a history unresolved posit pivotal social discourse on bare and dilapidated walls of the oppressed, exposing their oppressors’ intentions for exploitations, the naiveties of the oppressed as well as the moral campus of a world that has a disdain for black folk.

(These thoughts are still simmering and evolving.)

Both films are startling in their own way, dealing with equally vital subject matter, the past and its impact on the present, gazed upon by eyes confronted by a vast fabric of external opinions.

Each theme as treated by these films metastasizes into indiscriminant tales of urban alienation together with rural suffocation, seemingly occurring in unobstructed continuity and similitude. 

When I always engage Khanyile, there is always a prudence of fervor about matters close to his heart, such as the black condition within a milieu of social discrepancies characterizing the modern age, and this is visible in his documentary films.

There are plenty of diverse issues addressed by his recent meditative documentary A New Country, which he admits having “drained and extracted all optimism I had for this country”.

 A young filmmaker making a mark on a growing compendium of contemporary voices in continental cinema, he remains perennially relevant, using his craft to become a best channel imaginable for the urgent questions we have today as a society.

Not cluttered with personalized details, the narration speaks of a method of distilling a vast array of opinions into a coherent impulse, paced through galvanizing shots and edits, all woven into rhythm by sublime sonic interpretations of moods.

And with an intriguing crop of minds speaking on contentious issues related to identity, sexuality, economic freedom versus equal access to mineral wealth and the colonial legacy of neo-imperialism, A New Country is a brave collection of thoughts by minds who are proprietors of a diseased legacy.

Although it poses divergent opinions in harmonious sequences of intentionality, the film, unintentionally I suppose, often feels like an academic dissertation from multiple trajectories speaking from a single vantage point of those begrudged souls vindicated by public evidence.

This is not a terrible thing when one accepts the inextricable continuity that belies all struggles assailing this disillusioned generation of freedom’s children, for even though occupying different socio-economic strata, a commonality of ruined lives is omnipresent.

Dying For Gold on the other hand, while becoming a filmic witness to the treachery of conditions underground and aboveground, exposing various deceptive techniques used within the mining industry’s propaganda machinery, its use of archives and old films of the time explicitly testifies to the exploitation, prejudices and utter contempt for future generations.

The intonations of cold commentary juxtaposed with approved images by the powers that be, are haunting reminders of the disregard for human dignity that influenced and characterized all adopted policies of a tyrannical apartheid regime, as well as its repercussions into the future.

These two films will go down in our memories as a dare for a generation of activists, who require adequate ideological grounding in order to confront all organized exploitation with eloquent dissidence.

And as I hope that Sifiso Khanyile has mustered his faith in the trajectory our new minds are geared t guide the country, I wonder if he has changed his mind after allowing truth to excruciate his person for the sake accountability to the past.

Catherine and Richard are active in this collectively continued struggle for reparations for the mineworkers, with those fathers and mothers who shared their stories being among a vast majority now relegated to obscurity of rural existence, discarded like used tools and forgotten by globe-trotting profiteers.

And it is my hope that these documentaries travel far and wide to townships and squatter-camps, mine hostels and churches, schools and taverns, in order to sensitize our communities about a ceaseless assault on the livelihood of the poor and disadvantaged.

It is when artistic practice bends to the whispers of those rendered voiceless, when film speaks in the jargon of the maimed, with them and on their behalf, that is when film BECOMES that which is not only a reflection but an introspective gaze into all horrors that make up our troubled physical and inner spaces.

At Home - A Photo Shoot To Prove A Fire

 Model: Tebogo Mgodoyi

Images: Paul Zisiwe

Meditation On Revellers

 

Dathini Mzayiya – The Gravity Of Politics In Art

What is a political art, I often ask myself when observing various works denoting or depicting political scenes, upheavals and personages either in iconoclastic representations or deviant renditions that speak of an expressed sentiment.

The malaise is further exacerbated when exploring a number of Dathini Mzayiya’s works which, as I believe, provide very living metaphors to the confusion of our dead past and breathing present.

A commitment to blackness, as a form of lived disharmony with purported gains of its liberation or lack thereof, the lurking visages of brute force, symbolized by police brigades greased in blood, are yet other iconic indictment on brutalities experienced at the hands of a law. 

His work critiques pluralities of terror against blackness, through layered techniques that express an excess of prohibitions and obstacles within the black experiences in post-apartheid South Africa.

The Saints (2012), also referred to as The Founding Fathers is an emancipatory piece which is not timid in its depiction of a social myths sustained by self-gratifying leaders. Revisiting the work in light of the recent passing of FW De Klerk, one is given untranslatable co-presentation of memory past and present.

As a descriptive, or an interpretative or an explicitly critical approximation of two former leaders, who appear to have painted halos over each other’s heads, the artwork is a crucial as well as a participatory, social activism in light of new form of political communication about our fraudulent past. 

Provocative themes of tokenism are hinted in work depicting the EFF as SOLD, or the altered face on an ANC campaign poster, are speaking as political witness where the black body is a constant battleground for exploitation and fetishism and eventual corruption. 

And as a long tradition of “urban artivists” have always accepted that no art produced against tyranny and violence is ever in vain, such are the vague and nebulous piece expressing Dathini’s feelings about events such as the murder of Andries Tatane and the subsequent acquittal of the POLICE force that fatally shot him, in a purportedly democratic South Africa. 

These pieces form a gloomy chorus of black hopelessness, retracting from established versions of facticity and historical memory, providing a post-political rhetoric devoid of allegiances.

I often stare aimlessly at somewhat destroyed identities fractured on Dathini’s canvases, a mosaic of anonymities exquisitely executed in epic depictions of present histories and believe that the gravity of art is a catalyst in complicating and not simplifying the perceived truth of violations.

This bravery is evident among many young South African artists and should be commended and lauded, even though there might be an alarming anonymity of social spaces for such visceral art that explores vivid narratives of an immediate struggle, especially in townships.

 It is now becoming a concern for galleries prone and accustomed to curate according to market-based tastes that they seem to cater less and less for the ideologically astute citizen who is not interested in utopian escapism, and given art’s interpretive openness, a need for spaces with diversely progressive visions is evident.

Art that is a form of political discourse, is now becoming a norm even in often otherwise conservative spaces where Dathini is working and exhibiting, which could be prelude to the return of art that is insusceptible to traditional political analysis, speaking to current trends and steeped in ideological dissidence and subversions. 

And while some of our talented creative practitioners receive their recognition and public acclaim, there still remains a vast majority who are yet to find audiences. This could be because there still exists trends that privilege certain art practices, thus marginalizing by means of epistemic downgrading other forms of expression.

Artists representing political views are not immune to segregation and perpetual lack of resources; and this can be countered by establishing collective art safe zones, where unrestricted creativity is allowed to flourish.

Images sourced from Artist's Pages

Portraits With Light

 Images By: Paul Zisiwe

SUFFOCATION I & II - Buhle Nkalashe Art

It is often easy to surmise that an artist’s creative process is comprised of rigid routines and methodological analyses of materials for the production of art for its own sake, but I find the opposite is often the case, when observing how Buhle Nkalashe goes about creating his mesmeric diaphanous artworks.

A certain frolicking spirit imbues his mixed media paintings with a somberly contemplative, yet empathetic gaze at subjects he attempts to capture, and this sincerity in interpretation is often what contemporary lack. 

An impoverishment of empathy, as characteristic of pompous postures commonly associated with artists is absent in this young artist, who still considers his rural upbringing a virtue that empowers his complex view of the world and humanity in general.

His craft seems a playful engagement with matter in the material sense, as well as matters close to political climes of a turbulently bourgeoning nation facing a multi-layered future drawn from a tormented and suffocating past.

As with the two artworks in his Suffocation Series, I am struck not only by the artist’s treatment of ephemeral materiality of his objects to foreground sinister realities experienced in the present by many a black people.

The idea of suffocation can be viewed literally but as his artworks slip conventional classification by drawing form varied established disciplines while constantly remaining in aesthetic pursuit of a new, an immersive entanglement with materials, their reassembly on each canvas and the paradoxes and tempered perspective they arouse, give the paintings a haunting air of a silent witness.

Jests of flamboyant colors creeping about an outline of a head on undefined shoulders from darkly hued blues and earthen gold enveloping hidden faces, solely eyes, sightlessly communicating a strangled impression of isolation and helplessness. 

This unenviable pain and breathlessness written on masked expressions is a true metaphor of our times of suffocated imaginations, with emboldened outlines, a form of borders, disallowing fluidity between the subject and their environment.

Figures emerging coherently with serenity that alternates with uncertainty, steady gazes already assailed by dire intimations of rejection hence their veiled appearances, perhaps. 

Nkalashe’s art is not merely tangential, but an art that modifies beyond definitional concerns of multi-disciplinarity, those liminal connections between all disciplines mixed into a singular medium of expression.

He creates work that dares reimagine realities, emotions and premonitions within a temporal sphere of the contemporary, giving a body presence to each event and emotion espoused by each piece. 

I unsteadily assume that these pieces were produced as a lens through which to view broader issues of isolation and trauma in social and political contexts, but that is merely an interpretative stance from an observer’s vantage point.

But, trusting that more invigorating work is yet to be birthed by Nkalashe’s curiosities, we can always look forward to uncanny reconfigurations of the everyday and its pulsating characters.

Find more artworks at

www.buhlenkalashe.co.za

A Neo-Naturalism Of Daniel K Tladi

There is an exhalation that seethes through one upon stumbling upon what is often termed “rare”, be it interviews with renowned writers or artworks recovered after being “lost” for centuries.

I also marvel at what might be called an introduction to the unknown, which in itself does not imply “discovering” that which one didn’t know they had not known.

But, I still find it odd that all art lost to pillage by colonial powers is never viewed through that same lens of awe, as though the art of Africa belongs to humanity in its entirety.

The obscurity of the notion that ours is an art that deserves archiving as mere curiosities, and the inherent prejudice that ours is art that is archival by default, cannot be accepted as a norm, even in circles of art criticism and ‘appreciation” or “appropriation”.

This has led me to constantly question motives of western criticism and thus work towards recording moments in of development in African art, providing some semblances of analyses towards contemporary creative practices by artists who would otherwise be relegated to the margins of artistic landscapes.

Upon discovering the work of Daniel K Tladi at one exhibition at Aardklop Kunste Festival, a natural urge sprung to jot an article as an endeavor to explain to myself the creative visions spurred by the man’s works which I can only call naturalistic, bearing in mind my limited knowledge of various artistic movements which inform contemporary expression.

Naturalism, I had initially associated with literary schools of thought that emanated from a natural rejection of augmentations of reality, those that thrived towards amoral attitudes in the objective representation of reality with complete impartiality. 

When later I became acquainted with various other movements of expression that highlighted nature as the first principle of reality, art forms that attempted to depict the human subject in its formative relationship with natural habitats and social milieu, it invariably became abundantly clear that a new wave of naturalism is being remodeled through oils and brushworks, strokes of a younger emergent generation of South African painters.

Having exhibited his art at various South African art institutes and galleries such as the NWU Gallery and The B Gallery, either in group exhibitions or a solo artists, Daniel K Tladi’s collection always reflects an uncanny preponderance for banal moments between moments of the spectacular, these undefined silences implicit of a patient flow with the time and spaces he captures.

With a visual accuracy approaching that of photography, at a glance, his detailing of landscapes and their magnanimity presented as plausible, rather provides glimpses into a life most often thought of as antiquated and long gone.

Daniel further eclipses his interpretations of nature with paintings of unadulterated rural life; the arduous nature of earthbound toil that characterizes marginalized communities fused with social tension prevalent in contemporary South Africa.

His aesthetic system is not one that attempts to constitute itself as a faithful imitation of realistic objects in natural environments, but conversely capturing transient testimonies of those object in time, with a distinct focus on the barren spaces emerging from canvases representing representational worlds without omitting guarantees of inner truths.

This divergence from notions of exactitude without exhausting the variable potential embedded in events and images depicting those events, is a signature that acknowledges the plurality and dynamism of nature, often speaking to themes of climate change through drought stricken localities, and gender disparities through representation of rural expediency of archaic roles allotted women folk.

Much as art produced by artists of African descent has often been viewed with the condescending lens of western patronage, salaciously viewed as products from the lower rungs of global imaginary evolution, there is an emergent curatorship that has positioned such artists into isolated arena and splendor of fine art galleries. 

These efforts continue to nurture and unearth formidable talent not constrained by the modernist agenda often go unnoticed due to certain unpalatable themes of endemic poverty, gendered violence, political rhetoric echoing anti-colonial dispositions.

Artists such as Daniel are contesting a colonial view steeped in ”an apartheid fetishist romanticism” of African social environments, devoid of critical engagement with psychological nuances of the environments and its people.

A unique voice in an otherwise art world scandalized by old-fashioned concepts of “high art”, Daniel is carving a career with a fiercely local recourse, a sophisticated technique not detached from formalism but woven within a collision of style and aesthetic unique to his human nature and arch sentimentality. Extending the traditions of oil painting into personalized views of social life, his work is composed beyond the chaotic and often immanent gloom of many black livelihoods.

And with an evident commercial acumen that has allowed him to sell paintings to local and international collectors, it is vividly evidenced that there is rapidly growing demand for contemporary African art. This hunger for African art, after centuries of being relegated to museums as specimen of lower humanity, is also staking the hope of contemporary artists on a market that can receive their work.

Chromatic composition of blues, greys coalescing in oranges exploding at times into dreamy golden glows of midday light, a diffusion of strokes of oils to yield unexpected hues of sunset vibrancy; such delicate details by virtue of necessity on the part of the artist, evince a particular fundamental humanity and humility of craft.

Practice without public acclaim, voicing a political sensibility to the lives of black folk for instance, are markedly a move away from a multitude of creative practitioners concerned with non-vicarious representations of the black experience.

Theirs is an emerging, though unacknowledged black art culture, producing accessible work that interrogates complex geographies of poverty, denuded environments as well as the spiritual traumas of exclusion and exploitation, while also lauding the jovial pleasantries of a life given unto fate.

A vexed and complex history manifests itself quite constantly in Daniel’s art, and it is inevitable that the spirit of each place finds expression through his brushwork. And for an artist to immerse himself in this endless quest for authenticity is but a trait of resilient craftsmanship, a hallmark of all selfless creative spirits.

Images courtesy of: Daniel K Tladi