Churches

The Three Sisters Churches exhibit an architectural radical practice which in essence is a reference to antiquity, an ode to religious Puritanism and all its elements, a tribute to mankind's adoration for his worship instincts. 

Erected in the 1800's, and maintained throughout the 1900's, these buildings remain proof that true craftsmanship can stand the test of time, endowing each structure with a stoically harmonious quality, where shapes and purpose seem aimed at proximity to the divine.

The aesthetic references and historical and political narratives carried in these walls are reminders of a time of religion played a part in segregationist politics.

Second Skin - The Art Of Turiya Magadlela

Edward Hopper, an American Artists once said: “Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist.” And this maxim seem appropriate when describing the work of Turiya Magadlela.

                    Ubuntu - A Lucid Dream Installation 

Artists, as often their taciturn nature tend to gaze at the world through echoes of hope in the seen and the imagined; art as manifestations of voyages through life. 

Artists, with their insatiable curiosity for antiquity always find means of expressing the incomprehensible meaning behind objects. Their ethereality and spirit.

I recently came across an installation of artworks by artist Turiya Magadlela, an exhibition predominantly constructed from hosiery and other under-garment materials made into make-shift structures resembling homes, workspaces and other spaces of confinement and enclosure.

The site of exploration is comprised of dismantled, dismembered and mended material waste, torn pantyhose stockings woven together to create enclosure that resemble tents and other temporary “protective” structures, a metaphor of the transience of notions of bodily security. 

And by eliminating the accepted conventional notions that these items imply a feminine penchant for bodily concealment, the installation becomes a signifier of an interchangeability of personality once one is “beneath the hide of stockings”, that proverbial yet impermanent second-skin.

But do skins always hide or they also reveal the unintended as permeable membranes or opaque filters that require extreme focus of inner sight to pull into view that which might resemble the known and familiar?

Although stockings are viewed as tropes of mass-produced commodities, their gender-specific role attribution seems to bring to question the holistic relationship between women and their under-garments as markers of their identities and prescribed social function.

***

There is an aesthetic beauty however, to the merger of body and the second skin in Turiya’s tented structures, where the skin stretched into shapes that conjures shelters. In the hues and textures we are left with a beguiling world that foreshadows the rusty world of today’s future.

Beyond the novelty of these accessories lies the language of resistance, pondering issues of gender conditioning and the existential crisis of misogyny and brutal masculinity that confines rather than emancipate.

These stretched private coverings and their seductive power, like an invasion of the sacred becoming a diagnosis of paranoia, especially the paranoid shame felt by men at the sight of imagined nudity.

Knitted together to symbolise a sort of shared destiny for all womanhood, this work avoids didactic narratives but expresses a collectively conscious dilemma, the installations are an examination of imposed meaning on the feminine body.

Domesticity implied through colours and textural variety, but reinventing a range of motifs that speak to the supposed fragility of femininity, and insisting on a personal reminiscence that subverts the male gaze’s anathema on the female body.

These coverings render a classification that contains the messy realities of being a woman in masculine empire, within which womanhood is calculable and governable within the language of subservience.

***

Celebrating the undefined power of ceremonial art, where a varied number of creative forces coalesce in an experiment that yields woven tapestries; those intricate physical properties of her art thus sets it apart from work-specific logic of, for instance, painting or other conceptual art. 

Group patterns are an accessible activity regardless of age and skill that has deep roots across cultures, and Turiya has been conducting these sessions to connect people in a non-verbal yet practical way.

As part of a roster of artists who are active participants in their communities, Turiya continues to engage aspirant creatives from all walks of life into collective practices that reverberate with concepts of resistance through construction.

A sculptural logic that communicates both the visible and invisible female labour permeates these daring and incisive sculptures that invite engagement with stigmas of gender dynamics remain works that defy definition but continue to reveal new perspectives on normative discourse.

Fabrics that bear witness to social secrets, providing a scathing critique of oppressive trends - these shelters give pride of place to new dialogues about community and its stirred emotions towards the female body and accompanying social constructs. 

The relationship between visual arts and design and cultural heritage seems the poetical intention of her installations, where these corrupted material are regenerated without cessation, where explicit socio-political potentials of art are explored.

Her installation is a type of hypnic jerk during proverbial slumber of our distracted and socialised minds, a twitch that sobers audiences to speechlessness often experienced by the concealed in women.

It is a form of analysis on the contemporary geography of individual experiences communicated through non-traditional means towards a collective exposure of strife and resolution, espousing a fresh space for liberation of all urges.

Her aesthetic symbolises the inescapable intermingling of all lives, looking beyond women as accessories for the male gaze, but protagonists in a new narrative of femininity.

And in an infinitely fragmented discourse about femininity, her work manifestly instantiates manyfold conceptual possibilities for interpretations. 

Projecting Isolation

 

The Inevitable Evergreen Tree

Kgosietsile Monoto once expounded on a profound philosophy that, for writers and artists to truly impact social revolutions, their creative calling is not solely to speak and dream about revolution, but to embody its rigours and strife, its tensions and war. 

For this poet, it appears that poetry is a resistance and unwavering struggle towards the inevitable.

His anthology, aptly titled THE INEVITABLE EVERGREEN TREE, speaks of a metaphor rooted in nature, and as nature is neither a force of good or evil, but a continuous happening - it thus follows that such as the ever-growing tree, each word is but a leaf that flakes off a branch which nourishes birth in a cycle of being.

Poems of longing, disgrace a blend of the imaginative and the actual, gazed at through senses of a child with a bold animality and innocence wildly flaunted with apprehension amidst forces of good and evil.  

About his work he writes that “poems like I AM BLACK, NAMELESS challenge and question the status quo of people of colour, their condition and subsequently their role in shaping their reality…”.

He further states that:

In the bright shadows of figures that furnish unimaginative

Minds

We stand

As poets and poetry

As potteries that anchor roots of pot tree…

Therefore, it’s no surprise that his poems’ aesthetic sensitivities is rooted in those shadowy realms of a mind infested with an immense awareness of social injustices, black pain and the unending cycle of deferred dreams and disappointments.

I wonder if a poem such as A PLACE I COME FROM is but an apt homage to protest traditions steeped in words and soundscapes and physical drama of those exploring the “silver lining of horizons” unexplored.

***

At times, feeling similar to verse spoken or sung as protest slogans in wars, Kgosietsile’s poetry bears resemblance to schools of Spoken Word artistry that is never divorced from the social and tangible, and at other readings the text feels like confessions of a breaking soul to whom sleep will never suffice.

It shows the connections between protest narratives of yesteryears mirrored in a contemporary language

And it must have been through some feat of desperate determination rom him, to tirelessly work at publishing his work within the cauldron of a fragmented and self-censoring South African poetry scene. 

Voices carry and deliver differing calamities and this difference is what imprints unique textures to one’s poetic temperament. And as often as is the case, his work is one such voice being born from gutters of lost “love revolutions”, desperate households and criminal exhibitionists.

And it is through independent publishing means that he ensured this anthology becomes testament that artists can work outside the strictures of publishing cartels and bring uncensored literary experiments to life.

***

Kgosietsile Monoto has a captivating quality of mastering those subtle and deceptive township experiences, shedding light on a wide range of emotions, encouraging the reader to shift their experiences of these given realities to a distinctly lucid terrain. 

Images invoked are not oriented in the visual alone, but the often desiccated landscapes of the mind,  emphasising various complex characters that people both his memory and lived experiences.

This anthology doesn’t pretend to be a canonical work but somehow dabble in the poetic of politics as they are lived by many through their urbanist strife. 

A fascinating interplay of shadows and lights in life, with vigorous poetic strokes using an often demonised colonial language; this collection of poems therefore personifies multifaceted complexity of de-colonial methods of emancipating one’s imagination.

There is subtlety of expression, a lucidity of explaining the astounding with playful clarity that makes his art as a poet explorative and reflective, without falling into deprecating nostalgia.

And that makes such a modest book a marvel which should also be introduced to the young, encouraging them to read beyond words and endless feeds and memes of present-day information-age audiences and their constructed existence.

The publication itself stands as an unobjectionable proof that collective artistic practice, can produce creative output that will withstand ravages of time, even though books and clouds may disappear, their mere expressions will resonate into time unknown.

RreDot, as he is fondly known by his fellow wordsmiths, remains one of the most pivotal voices that have emerged from Khutsong and he has managed to BREAKDOWN our collective breakdown as a society on the verge of an inter-generational tyranny of complacency with future exploitation.  

This anthology is a form of memory retrieval through text, an unbounded verbal exploration of ghosts and lovers gone, of lands dissolving and houses crumbling, burying broken families.

A reminder of ills that pave a bitter tomorrow, and the sorrows sown for future generations by unimaginative masters and teachers, and a portal through which to envision new remedies.

Small Town Streets

Small Town Streets

Ominous clouds of pedestrian insanity

Hedged about burning heads,

Mind a ruin that was imminent;

All fleeting testaments of civility and instructions

Colliding with other bored intentions at bravery.

Intimate scents of mined earth and leaves,

Gnarled branches of trees dead on their root 

Carrying rags and torn plastic bags; 

And standing drenched by thin streaks of raindrops misting his eyes

The poet calls for his mirror souls to merge with dying light.

***

In these street, incensed perorations are thundering through raging speakers - rapt believers postulating themselves before masked oddities posing as gods’s brokers that spoke of death as currency. 

A girl with tousled hair sits with her palm open, face down in the immensity of the street where other urchins grip luxurious coats of passerby women begging for coins, anxiety glazed in their eyes.

In this suburban camp, churches are founded on fear of death; for them the dead are demons of their most vile memories. 

The streets are narrow cathedrals where faces are cast low in shame and agonies brimming on sweaty brows of enraged maids and madams disappointed by their men.

White-washed balconies of revered dreams stand tall, still erect towards supine skies and inside, fevered prayers led by blasphemers are heard amidst a raucous of shocking music chorused with wails of unfed infants.

In the distance, the muffled rattling of trains on tracks and wheels on tarmac hissing and slithering through the night towards days, past shacks and sleeping herds, in wild spaces where seeds are buried in poisoned dust.

Caught unawares by a strange recognition of how the girl was later found dead and dismembered - dark memories, those guttered by his failures in a diabolical society that respected no life; he finds himself wishing to forget.

And that compulsion to understand her premature death in a mind dishevelled by anguish as his own, was something monumental - distraught recollections of how or why; no reason ceded nor intentions.

Those subtle obstacles appearing when emotions unfurl, such as guilt charging eyes with rage, condemned to dissolution, those unholy urges still draw one nearer to a precipice.  

In forgetting her, perhaps a precipice he would approach with a patient resolve of a man who was once a specimen of modesty, its heaving walls of bones whispering some silly validations unearned; and that way his monsters might feel vindicated to hurt others.

He wonders if in others’ deaths we see our own, and instinctively look away with tears boiling in our eyes yet not for the deceased, but ourselves who will in certainty recline in a posture of resolve without breath or warmth.

***

Restaurants stocked once with displays of ostentatious luxuries 

Spill onto floral avenues bottles and left-overs 

Trampled into tar by vain automobiles.

Discreetly mingling with prostitutes are poets 

And knights of rogue dynasties, 

Some priestly vagabonds that speak gospels of pleasure and hell.

And surely these are dark ages in these sanctuaries

Of thieves that suck blood from impressionable virgins 

Through straws and cathode eyes of butchers of trends.

Surely these are final feasts before a great dying

With costumes of birth dropping from wounded delinquents

When tables turn against lost thoughts and gods unwittingly feeding on bones.

***

For these valued communities enabled by privilege to wrest power from the downtrodden - this arid land is thundering with unheeded rage.

Fortunes usurped and roots unceremoniously grabbed and tossed, are dangling for earth and soot of mud drenched with blood.

The dead are breathing again, surveying taverns and orphanage townships growing vengeful and impatient for repose.

Yet there is no rest for those dead, their war chars fields feeding livestock and man; servitude compensated with blistered skins of emaciated gold diggers.

In this town, a sham of wealthy orders are disobeyed by smiling lunatics, as uneven earth shifts to swallow bandits into spoiled soil.

***

Shabbily curtained windows glint in the winter sun and a pensive melancholy broods over his complexion. With reality fraying his senses; fragrant wit passes through eyes that digested every sight, yet often excitable to tears.

There’s a secret daily thrift behind locked doors and unseen eyes at windows, working at a scatter of gardeners prowling deserted yards and sidewalks. These job-seekers stimulate inquiries from concerned neighbours taught to fear blacks.

And more lessons in human cruelty he observes, from an excluded soul, braving rot and malice directed at housemaids of this small town.

It is in these small town streets that he feels excluded from everything he once knew, even the mundane material scenes colliding onto his mental canvas in a hauntingly perpetual presence of memory like a cruel baptism.

The potholed decay of white architecture handed down reluctantly and grudgingly to hordes of discarded farm-hands, rots underfoot and they in turn become sidewalk chefs of scanty meals and muti dreams for lovelorn wage workers.

Suddenly unnerved, a thought of his mother in the chilled breath of night rattles in him, her bed’s side table of bibles and pills; how she slaved to build temples that housed thankless masters and their dogs.

Tasting smoke from  fried meat-stalls, loiter files of homeless migrants, other inelegant crowds of overall clad garbage collectors celebrating wages on dingy basement strip shows and cheap wines - as he stares at butchered car-wrecks and rusting tractors.

***

Nodding ghosts of apartheid stare down with pigeons perched on broken streetlights and tenaciously cling to bones of shredded affluence ransacked by cults built on adulations from slaves and altered personages. 

Lost masters sweat profusely on seats of bakkies, hurling curses at black trolley-pushers chasing sterile dreams, arthritic grannies bejewelled with golds and pearls limping behind electric crutches towards wall-paper shopping malls for empty errands.

High-walled nurseries for the elderly echo with coughing fits, fumigated lounges decorated with antique nostalgia draped in botanical absurdities and electronics surveilling their approach towards death.

As insolent floods of red blazers swarm the streets with adolescent buzzing and rushing with agility of mice, fast-food laboratories gape to milk their fuss over savoury junk diets.

And drowning in a pool of fatal-errors are many such youths, seeing life through panes of rackety taxis or gleaming SUV’s - drugged to the constant discomforts of degradation and dilapidation abound.

This town, is but an ambivalent vacuum of memories, bearing an apocalyptic air of playful depression disguised in ill-omens and hints of promiscuities - in its trenches magnified corpses of rockfall victims and suicides that plunged from hospital rooftops.

White faced degenerates still parade their tattoos and needle scars around blacked out street, speaking in laughable dialects with drug paddlers who work on credit. 

And as the sun falls behind the earth’s line towards pain healing oblivion, children of this ghost town gather in secret, sacred districts for orgies and near-fatal car-rides.

 

Incomprehensibility As Metaphor

Do all stories we wish to leave behind speak of those those borne out of reflection?Does the incomprehensibility of dreams mirror the incomprehensibility of memory?

Are memories mere dissociated wisps of continuous rhythms of human life?

Are these imaginatively temporary tragedies serving as milestones on the road to expiration?

And does one’s mind comprehend the immensity of the flawed record called memory?

***

Although comprehension can be said to be ‘an individual experience’, would an inability to comprehend be resonant of patterns of sparse relationships we have with memory we scatter throughout our lives?

Are personal reflections but fragmented voices and will their vulnerable status force upon them a form of ‘masking’ of personal narratives with version that efface the individual?

The precariousness of narrating such personal potentialities in a collective practice such as music and theatre remain to be explored by artists and thinkers who are determined to torch all foundations of dogmatic systems of thought.

 

Art that surveys inner worlds can often disorient, collected artefacts of memory often require such a feat of deconstructive rearrangement that what is often residual allows for new and infinite abysses of interpretation.

But should art avoid pitfalls of over-sensitivity and rather exhibit its disdain for unexploited landscapes of the mind alone? Or are such landscapes entwined with the external, preceded by joyful ambiguities of human insight?

Are all synchronised origins of art like bloodlines transmitted through audaciously crafted vocabularies that are determined by each individual throughout the surreal dream through existence (inner and outer).

Are audio-visual languages and poetics, and other figurative languages of art invented to remind us how metaphorical experiences are?

***

Persistence with the ordinary creates a sensuous disquisition into the nature of the extraordinary. 

Being a direct, discreet mission of the inorganic to be entwined with the spiritual aura that pervades all organic nature, would not these contradictory urges cultivate a helplessness peopled with fears of exposing one’s soul?

Would writing about memories from memory be but a sensory quest for intellectual experiences to be distilled into fictional antipathy?

Would one be poorly compiling only narratives entangled with colonial geographies, concerned with methods of decolonial translations of said geographies, their carnal paradigms veering between extremes of despair and exhilaration?

Does comprehending these idiosyncratic tensions that exist between the private and public bonds of continuity in the the absence of drama; is that what emory-handlers aspire to reclaim?

***

Trivial conversions

Urges fouling the innocent, 

Sympathetic details of personal tortures

The remoteness of words

Beyond recitations of life and periodic wanderings

And interludes of unhappiness

This morbid obsession with the fleeting, 

Roving pebbles of thoughts floating like pollen

In that air of abandon;

As an art that lost its margins

Has necessity become

An integral phenomenon of uncovering mystery?