Neferuda Art

Once I came across the prints of works by a well-known South African artist Nandipha Jantjies, I could not be nothing more than intrigued to a point of reflecting on the works I saw both a mirror of my personal inner femininity, or perhaps a mirror of all womanises in all.

An art practice that defies categorisation, speaking an unusual language of forms with a remarkable versatility of imaginative encounters, illuminating on scenarios of counter-expression from disobedient terrains that confound commercialisation.

There are poetics of dance embodied in movements of her figures, who seem captivated and captured at moments of some euphoric self-realisations or valuation, choreographed for sensorial reception through sight, the aural and the smells of sweating skin seeping as though the artworks were portraits of the artist herself. 

Through random selection of available images of Nandipha’s works, I have selected for this note transcends blanket categorisation and feels as though it is meant to orient viewers to some invisible and unspoken, and the complexities of intertwined experiences and memories thereof.

Tokoloho is yet another intriguing piece which interprets freedom through blackness, locating and fixing the viewer’s gaze, inviting them to pause and reflect and expand their scope of surveying these bodies in their denuded exuberance, without severing or restricting them from their identities.

Her uncanny depictions of women with a cubist streak, evoking new curiosity that refuse to conform to the viewers’ expectations, are a reflection of the resistant energy her figures exhibit both as personalities and symbols of collective femininity.

Geometrically severed faces and limps, heads adorned with stars, chests pimpled with markings similar to astrological mappings; others captured in provocative poses that point to “injuries” or elements of discontent in the physic of these figures - what are these figures voicing? 

Disfigurement looking similar to jewellery, as a form of ornamentation reminiscent of many sculpted African figurines, these images are a beauty that embrace and reverse urban myths around feminine vulnerability. 

Neferuda’s (as Nandipha often signs her artworks) figures are magnanimous on paper or canvases, and while subverting the male gaze various misguided myths are revisited with a crispness that nevertheless embodies uncensored pride in the often commodified female body. 

Horned and domineering, Nandipha’s allusions to maternal nurture are in themselves inner geographies of personal imaginative inquiries into the idea of connections with nature that is still cradled in humanity inner reservoirs, while similarly lamenting that loss.

Ambiguously positioned between practices that range from printmaking, painting and digital printing, Neferuda’s art elucidates on way of perceiving womanhood and similarly questions these processes of perception and observation in the greater arena of identity construction in the face of mass objectification of the female body. 

And from this vantage point, her is an art that stands outside norms of palatable representation of womanhood beyond racial perimeters, isolated yet all encompassing and embracing a plethora of definitions constructed or ritualised, but also fluid just as the curves on her robust bodies. 

Images from The Artist's Social Media Pages

Pious Distortion - A Khahliso Matela Video Poem

 

Incomprehensibility As Metaphor Part 2

There certainly exists an incomprehensible global alignment of artistic efforts, a bridge of collective interpretations of transient themes that are universal to the personal and public narratives.

To work at nurturing a radical existential interconnection in the face of our physical displacements and phantom lives; re-emerging and disintegrating within subversions of cultural hegemony.

Being authors of diverse cultural heritages superimposed and transposed to a level of instinct and commemorative memory.

What better way to relearn that would enunciate our united machine that represses individual desires?

Enfolded minds presenting a singular intimation, establishing languages of beyond patronised art, the sedated type engaged with trends, but an art practice that flaunts convention, reflecting on our interwoven dystopia futures. 

Should there be move towards a new collective subjectivity, art as tool for improvising unitary exchange’s where the diverse units create a global native narrative?

What are devices to be used to grasp what binds all of us to a common instructive venture into the subjective? 

How do we envision the merging of the spiritual and material in a porous ritual, venerating art objects whose meaning is often comprehensible through sites of passages into altered states of mind?

Pulsating, living environments of the soul contacting each other, stretching tentacles into infinite immaterial realms, that is our devotional function as artists that never arrive at destinations intuited.

Artists excavating new solutions for old drudgery, together gathering and retaining an aesthetic awareness of their own accord. 

These reformulations of sacred omens, are for a contemporary imagination, a reawakening of multiple perspectives that reside in places we inhabit with our sacred dreams. 

A space where imagination provides its inhabitants an impulse for visibility, an anchored identity with meaningful wings to sore aloft staged images of our world - to make present the chaotic, transparent all constellations of pleasure and sorrow, exposing the self to intoxicating experiences beyond the sensory.

Our purpose therefore is to continually dissect our present and not withhold unknowable that trouble us, affectively reckoning with desires for a tinge of selfhood that continues to accompany our wonderment at life.

This art practice is not a mere escapism of the marginalised and their symbols of expression, from the medieval to the contemporary, from myths and habits to the realm of subjective realities.

It is an origins tale with new imagery sculpted from recent and distant pasts pulverised to a canvas of deconstructed materials and seeds mingled with curiosity and awe.

And together as we create alliances of artistic and literary narratives in salvaged form, assembled and yet slippery within a cultural atmosphere of discarded but remodelled materials and emotions - we begin to move from our conspicuous invisibility, charting a new and amorphous trajectory.

Art And AI - Questions

If art is imbued with sparks of spiritual intelligence, can artificial intelligence in turn fathom any spirituality in its own creations?

If art can unveil the spiritual within materiality, can material machines produce art that is spiritual by its own volition? 

In a digital realm of speculative realities, can a system of computational thought processes operating as a unit conjure an imaginative spectre that confounds even the definitions of art?

And what will resultant technocratic social systems under artificial intelligence imply for artistic devices of contemplating such an essentially human subjective construct as art?

Will a machine be capable of imaginative dreams collated from a myriad of digital experiences which appear illegible to the human mind? 

Should art produced through algorithms and machine intelligence be viewed as devoid of methodic preservation of human psychic remnants; as a mere imposture of analytic data extracted from coded languages that define art?

Could art produced by machines be viewed as imposture evading classification as per human definitional parameters of what creativity is and should be, thus breaching elaborate borders of what beauty should embody?

Can a machine be arrested by beauty in a painting or song? 

Do they have an emotional grammar with which to fathom the imperceptible landscapes of the soul that constitute artistic expression?

Or is their failure to compute the spiritual, emotional and oneiric also imply an impairment to exhibit such state of expressive projections?

Does this failure to not conform to norms and forms of intelligibility, and resisting demands of silence that pervades much of history - histories censored or falsified; does this mean machine art is but a voice requesting to snap into an explosive  release. 

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Can art help dissolve boundaries between naturality and artificiality, when artificial intelligence is continually transforming the natural reality in which we live?

How does the digital re-animate our sterile realities, and do we imprint our humanness upon the digital and vice versa?

Can technology assist to unlock the socio-political potential of art?

Can AI supported mutuality based on the interdependent bond between humans and technology produce art that is beyond the ephemeral?

Can that be an an art that seeds and incites new forms of recognition of the familiar; requiring an imaginative “sensing” of what is being communicated through each work?

What psychological complexities can be endowed a work of art produced by artificiality?

Can such art redefine the global collapse we are hurtling towards, and will AI become the interlocutors of a people gone-by, buried with their mysteries and imaginative experiences?

Will AI through its impersonal recollections of humanness, reconstruct synthetic presences of the extinct, with a mechanical clear-mindedness of absolute permanence?

Will AI immortalise humanity in absentia?

A Note On The Potchefstroom Museum Art Gallery Exhibition

Through an exhibition stemming from a concerted and deep-rooted search exploring variation of themes of social disintegration, Ms. Losette Absolom has put together an indelible troupe of North West based artists who are charting their own language to dispel myths about the future of the region’s art.

These are artists who work across media, obscuring their themes with interwoven stories that often share a common geography of peri-urbanality, but also expressing a devotional element to the memories being captured.

Daniel Tladi’s oil paintings remain an intrepid example of the new voices that are exploring rurality from an urban perspective, a nostalgic eye that boldly paints the aridity of the province into canvases that still emit strong personalities living in the midst of scorched spaces.

In another of his works, Tladi provide a theme of extraction through his depiction of a mineshaft as a landscape marker of a continuous exploitation of ecologies, and through his harnessed technique he manages to capture in incisive hues the wealth still seemingly trodden by dust. 

These works in themselves are bodies that contain inverses, together a collective portrait of the evolution of fine art among often invisible practices of unfunded artists working solely from the vestiges of their passion.

Portraits that reimagine notions of beauty also grace the walls, responding to the vast question of self-reflection as a theme among young artists; and social class differences are extremely prevalent in representations of black experiences in these works.

Tshenolo Mokoti’s architecturally blurred painting titled SUNRISE, with a stark absence of any sun itself, reminisces on notions of absence and renewal that is spawned from scarcity.

A cluttered city skyline is of no precise impact but stands to testify the long wait for that which is yet to be, an anticipation perhaps, of messages from the past about the present, a form go ghost-work embracing multiplicities of memories of yearning.

Another of Mokoti’s paintings is of a young boy provocatively scratching his bum, waiting in line for his turn at the window of a tuck-shop - an image that presents a richly textured common-place childhood reminder of life in critical dialogue with its elaborately dire economic conditions.

Fire and Ice by Rose Senna is yet another series of artworks that dabble with multimedia approaches to memory and emotional voids, anxiety and perhaps devotion among other states. 

They somewhat embody a fragmentary return to the biting elements of life, Fire And Ice, with industrial materials such as glass shards centred on the canvas, embraced by coalescing colours, restless and seemingly rootless and regenerating.

Many of the works on exhibition are from a selection of intriguing portraitists who are mapping narratives from and about persons from their respective communities. 

No matter how the images they depict are created or sourced, what remains emblematic is the perspectives communicated through their representations. 

The heart infused with roots of a growing tree for instance, such that root and heart gain shape from one another - this multi-medial piece explicates on entwined forms, to explore and denote linkages that constitutes and unites all life sources and forms.

Another is a selection of what appears to be surrealist sketches of aged trees and contemplating these drawings, in dark tones one sees charcoaled entities, implying permanence in a world where even trees are in danger of irreversible extinction. 

Other sketches are of elderly faces and bodies captured to typifying everyday combustions of emotions, experiences and memories drawn from such realities.

These multi-layered artworks become a kind of re-evaluation of the state of local art, a many-headed approach to uncovering new talent and independent practices, who might otherwise improve through support and patronage from art lovers.

The exhibition, though it unsettles all internalised hierarchies of what quality art should be, it also comments on how developing talent can be overlooked by highbrow critiques of techniques that have been harnessed through sheer ingenuity.

With such a richly texture variety of aesthetic executions, the artist in this exhibition embody a shared historical background, visible through subjects and materials, but also revealing artists in a process of self-definition.

These paintings together provide viewers with strategies for remembering the present, employing suppressed realities and forbidden recollections of traumas and joys, and even the mythological and cosmic, thus attempting to heal intergenerational senses of displacement.