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.

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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.

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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.