Can Museums Be For Social Healing?

“An uncompromising clarity of vision in art carriers spiritual, political and ecological meaning.”

Our world is shaped by overlapping global crises, social upheaval and political disruption, with growing societal fragmentation and isolation intensified by rapid technological advancements and an economic system that fosters inequality.

And to address pressing questions of representation, institutional critique, and the possibilities of reimagining the museum from within, museums need kinds of experimental pockets, spaces that get torn down and rebuilt conceptually, again and again. 

The work and spaces must call for sustained, systemic self-criticism as a moral imperative, despite the inherent contradictions and potential for failure, reflecting on the changes of human behaviour—from the banality of evil to complicity and indifference.

With the colonial aphasia of our country’s  imperial past, continues the project by exposing racism and before and after apartheid, and culminates in a response to depicting how the atrocities of the war against colonialism, white supremacist nationalism, racism, and capitalism remain inextricably intertwined within the present reality.

Evidently, ideological violence against black histories and subjectivities enriches artistic languages of dissent and deepens intercultural approaches to restitution of immense social ills that are refracted through concepts articulated through various collections in museums and galleries.

Walking through colonial museums is an artistic and political act, one that fosters contemplation and connection within the chaos of the worlds we inhabit; worlds that unfold across the museum spaces, guides memory through themed environments that aim to enchant even as they unsettle.

At this juncture in the heated debate around representation of erased identities within museums, can artists explore uneasy questions around the commodification of historical trauma through mass-tourism experiences?

When we map each city’s iconic landmarks, tracing the emotional and sensory textures of contemporary life, one notices a thriving intercultural dynamism that is both commemorative of shared experiences and trauma. These spaces also afford opportunities fo healing.

The complexities of continuity of cultural heritage, craft, and artisanship—including sites and practices across the country that are under threat require interventions from the same museums which claim to be harbingers of hope for an unexpected future of museums.

And by foregrounding censored local cultural histories through the revival of craft practices and the preservation of the region’s globally-important material heritage, these spaces can device new ways of engaging with the past and its traumatic emblems; with a sense of inquisitiveness and resolve.

These new spaces, coordinated by inspired curators, can continue to support the need to generate new narratives, advocate for transparency as opt for a fluid and associative approach that mirrors the very nature of contemporary artistic and preservatory practice.

These new museums are thus not conceived as dead sammelsuria of documents, artefacts and paintings, but as a permeable, shifting structure—shaped by the practices it holds and continually transformed through engagement

Unlike traditional museums, the new spaces should cease to be the bizarre repositories of complex memories but spaces that extend into the archival realm, exploring how archives can hold memory to account, not only as traces or as records but also as “objects or subjects” still unfolding—forms that resists capture yet persists.

Part of the evolving roles of such institutions in shaping cultural memory, is inviting artists to consider archives not as a closed system, but as permeable sites—where the past is in motion and the performative continues to unfold

French philosopher Jacques Rancière (b. 1940), understood art not simply as tools of artistic production, but as a “sensory milieu”—an environment that reshapes how we perceive and experience the world as a multilayered space for thought that expands the boundaries of perception and awareness.

When we begin to view and hear these artefacts as subjects on equal footing with humans, adorning them with human qualities of wisdom, strength of will and all traits of cunning intelligence, we must therefore begin raising questions about how people affect and reshape the meanings of these artefacts, sculptures, into archival knowledge.

As battlefields occupied by the living and the dead, curators of these reimagined museum spaces must engage in new dialogues with recent acquisitions and animate the ghosts that accompany and haunt our present, through processes where history and memory converge.

There is a need for new heroism that is not centred around colonial personalities and events; a re-evaluation of human rights violations lorded s acts of victory by settlers, their plunder of indigenous lands should be viewed from the lens of social displacement on a scale that was never hear of.

To counteract the idea of sculptural monumentality enjoyed by the many gladiatorial monstrosities of colonial adoration, these canonised idols of power need to be re-viewed without filters of nationalism and biases of culture dominate. 

That eternally cowering gaze of the native towards imperial artefacts should be dissolved through archeologically rigorous research and authentication of events, names attached to heroisms of the past; an open-mindedness that fosters sensitivity toward social issues with conflicting perspectives.

These figures require a new eye to perceive beyond the veils of purported power, to reveal the sycophantic desires of European low caste personages who found bounty to plunder in far off lands, tracing their subtle yet startling connections to political, social and popular demonisation of indigenous persons.

And this project requires a visual language that serves to unburden the representation of marginalised bodies within the colonial milieu; unfaltering the colonisers’ gazes for a vivid and unprejudiced view of the human-ness of the subjugated.

The new museums for new imaginaries becomes each artist's site in a multidimensional way, a space where individual artists’ cultural backgrounds and sensory languages intersect, their works unfolding as ongoing processes.

If The Land Was A Man - On The Art Of Thokozani Mthiyane

Spanning painting, sculpture, performance, and installation, Thokozani’s commitment to historically situated and locally sourced materials addresses the complexities of continuity of cultural heritage within the contested “South Africa” identity.

Mthiyane, whose work playfully subverts traditional art- and exhibition-making, is a Johannesburg based artist who is largely influenced by his time spent under the tutelage of artists Sfiso KaMkame and Thami Jali. 

And undeniably, his work’s evolution has brilliantly underscored the profound contributions of many other South African artists in the visual arts, and by fusing painting and poetry with artistic flare, his language has probed a variety of compelling social incompetencies.

And scanning through his profiles on social media one finds a kaleidoscope of works, once is confronted by a plethora or images of his artworks, making one yearn for an opportunity to visit the artists studio.

He once asserted that his works are only premeditated up to maybe the first gesture. This is a trait the lurks throughout his seeming unfinished and self-finishing works.

Taking a glance at his sculptures, some seem crude yet transcendent, intertwining material and immaterial elements, creating a space where the visible and the invisible collide, offering an encounter that is at once immediate, uncanny, are transcendent and mind-boggling.

A nuanced analysis is needed to provide further insights into his many reflections on social issues, and his disobedience to the status quo is an affective and ethical stance—an act of repair within the damaged self-reflective world of black artistic practice often strangled by economic expectations and philosophical crudity.

Works such IF THE LAND WAS A MAN, Umzabalazo Womphefumulo, Isiphambano nomqhele wameva, how they reimagine the crucifix,  invoke a spiritual contradiction as many associate the cross as an emblem of salvation not oppression subjugation.

We confront paintings documenting spiritual themes picturing worshippers and their revered holy figures juxtaposed with an alternative abstraction steeped in a multitude of historical references; works that unsettlingly interrogate the politics and power dynamics implied by the yoke, symbolic of how religion has become for black people. 

Among his haunting sculptures are two which I have titled The Bone Machine (reminiscent of Tom Waits and his work as both musician poet and artists dabbling in various expressive techniques.

There is another that resembles THE HEART and another sculpture he titled Portrait (v), and one wonders if these are self-portraits. One such portraits done the severed dreadlocks that were a feature of Thokozani’s inner persona.

Ukubika komphefumulo exhibits an impulsive spirit yet intensely edgy and drawing on threads of the unknowable designs of chance, and what emerges is a frames of sundered materials (pieces of stretched skin) turning turned blue by either the cold or decay.

Without taking the artistic process too lightly and detracting from its value in the context of deep exploration and self-expression, each piece a true expression of artistic individuality rooted in simplicity and spontaneity.

At his exhibitions, Mthiyane always causes a thrill among the audience, a performer and poet who is always keen on inferring textual and vocal anecdotes. 

Besides his basic ideas, selection of topics and motifs, Mthiyane continues choose specific elements of art in addition to techniques and ways of composing paintings, his studio has become a place for the formation of unique workshops where artists, poets and musicians exchange experiences and inspire each other.

Although his art might seem to have began due to pure idleness, his is a concerted method creating unique hybrids of self-reflection and observations of the world’s hidden character.

Over time, his canvases grew to possess a certain individual artistic maturity and a clearly unique formula which is easily perceived; from metaphors of grief, symbols of contrition on disproportional figures in a specific setting rather realistically.

***

Images From The Artist's Profiles 

DADA or what???

Once asked about their artistic ethos, Cape Town based artist Dada Khanyisa emphasised that they are “interested in social dynamics, how people relate, how they engage, how they choose to present themselves, who they choose to have around them, and the places they choose to occupy. 

And when multi-disciplinary artist won THE 2022 FNB ART PRIZE, anyone who had been following their career with cynicism paid astute attention. 

After a walk through the exhibition held at The Johannesburg Art Gallery  in early 2024, the nuanced assemblages, collaged three-dimensional backdrops that incorporate found objects and architectural references, which are the signature of this renowned artist left an indelible mark on my psyche. 

Addressing minimal artistic gestures—there is  a selection of sculptures which I found intriguing, as they are at times rendered in the sleek three dimensions of a printed surfaces that only enhances the illusion of life with its sheen of escapist glamour.

Often taking their departure from from physical gestures of revolt to invisible architectures of codes of sexual identities, the work reflects on nostalgia and memories of bygone times in township love life, oscillating between revelation and erasure of those loved lives.

With titles like “iNkosi ibenathi in these polyamorous streets and between the sheets”, ‘eBree” and eBumnandini” and ‘uMpako” “aBomama bom’gidi”, Dada continually reflects on community and its varied members, the mothers, the lovers who meet a world in turmoil over sexual identity.

Depicting jovial scenes of friends pulled from street scenes, these artworks, each is a record of life in the hollow squaller of squatter camps or inner city slums.

The resolve to alcohol abuse that is characteristic of South African youth culture is also brought to the fore and questioned against other depredations of a hostile world where many reside.

Dada’s refusal to be boxed in by medium or artistic expectation, has liberated their creative practice from the stranglehold of consumer trends.

Their art might serves a social function by depicting events, situations and moments in which persecuted individuals can take refuge and form on their creative reconfiguration to serve the bodies that are bound by them.

The sculptural paintings that have become a signature style, have invoked mixed reaction from art community prone to market logic.

But can their practice become its own genre, and a creation of alternative forms of intimacy among people of diverse social origins?

Images from Artist Profiles.

New Imagineers or Naïve Art?

The consequences of internet proliferation of art has become a stark reality faced by artists working on the margins of the mainstream art market. 

These artists are often people of colour, working in improvisational media and multiple disciplines, renewed artists rekindling new flames of tradition rather than preserving tradition as static heritage.

Although the internet purports to be a global gallery where one can be introduced to diverse artists from vastly different scopes of artistic practice, but there are few of those who resonate with some inner chord for appreciating and seeing creativity for the messages it transmits.

 

 

And reading about the APY Art Centre Collective in recent article tackling a scandal about appropriation of indigenous art by white patrons, I was interested to acquaint myself with the work from the collective.

In the world of contemporary art with its endless variety of trends and movements, what I experienced was a kind of naive art that occupies a special place, a bridge connecting traditional art forms with modern movements.

 

Debates in the art historical community are heated about unschooled and self-taught artists and their practices, deeming their art as incapable of deep transformation of art. 

But this art movement often construed as Primitivism,  borrows visual forms from non-Western or prehistoric peoples, and is recognized by the state of the spirit, a pure soul of the artist, reflection of his/her feelings. 

Before the 20th century, in its most basic sense, the so-called “naive art” was any form of visual art created by a person who lacked the formal education and training a professional artist undergoes. 

When a trained artists emulates this aesthetic, it is often referred to as primitivism, pseudo-naive art or faux naive art.

Now, seeing the works of indigenous Australian artists like Helen Curtis and Iluwanti Ken, one observes how their often “naive art” often ignores the rules of perspective. 

 

The act of “seeing” is transformed into “being within” that with is seen, and perchance “that which is seen” is transformed into the seer guiding and ever transforming view.

Often characterized by a lyrical treatment of their environments and the poetic rendering of mythological and historical subjects, their work touch on the spiritual without being escapist. 

Although their practices seemingly necessitate exclusion, where they gain power through their insularity and a cultivated need for protection from other ideas, these artists nevertheless create compositions based on their inner perceptions, not on academic norms and standards.

 

Their art could easily be dismissed as art that’s created by people who “don’t know what they’re doing”, but that undermines the raw creativity found within works of the movement and its uninhibited and instinctive approach to materials, composition and ideas. 

Theirs are reverent thoughts rooted in personal histories, language and storytelling, involved in contemplation of belonging, loss, memory, with consequent trauma experienced by those whose psyches have been re-arranged.

Their consequent images portray inherited memories to tell personal stories that have been long silenced, affirming continuity between sediments of memory and the present, redressing unresolved ideological conflicts that constantly recur.

 

Their radical ethos, political and aesthetic engagement emanating from their artistic practices in the face of constant erasure by the art community; mediates their practices and the participatory dimensions undertaken, revealing how their existence manifests a radical form of presence in which body, environment, and time enter into immediate relation.

Like some sensible apostles of “a new objectivity”, these artists continue to pave renewed paths for approaching art in ways that trends and proper form ignores, and while conventional success is desired, a less inhibited way of working is encouraged.

***

Images by: APY Arts Center Collective (Adelaide, Australia)

For Your Family Archives

Mysteries From Antiquity - On African Sacred Artefacts (Lydenburg Heads)

Collections are vital assets for museums, offering insight into the artistic and historical trends of a given era. They act not merely as historical artifacts but as living agents of yearning that bridge continuity and transformation. 

Making their collections seen and accessible is a crucial role of museums, one that is fundamentally bound up with their very function. The Cabinet of Curiosities in 16th-century Europe, regarded as the origin of the museum, displayed rare and exotic collections, providing audiences with novel experiences and opportunities for intellectual exploration. 

With the rise of the modern nation-state, the definition of “public” expanded, and works of art that had once been privately owned became accessible to wider audiences, ultimately evolving into the modern museum.

In Africa however, the rampant pillaging of cultural art and the theft of art meant a far more sinister project was unfolding; one that was characterised by erasure and displacement of an entire people from the annals of cultural history.

During colonial rule, African people lost thousands of cultural artefacts through the brutish plunder by colonists. These works addressed an entire psychological ecosystem of an oppressed people, in response to the censure experienced under guise of missions to “civilise the natives”.

Now that museums are calling for restitution and repatriation of stolen African artefacts, the overlooked question is that of a contemporary people who are grappling with the instability of meanings drawn from their vague past, when they have been denuded of any knowledge about these sacred objects and their worth.

When one observes what is often termed as macabre artefacts from arcane history, we come to question whether these artefacts are haunted objects as they’ve been known to cause all sorts of mayhem and social chaos.

These sacred objects found throughout the African continent for instance, are fundamentally associated with knowledge and are secretly preserved. Owning them or knowing about them commands attention and silence from those who cannot have access to them.

But I have often wondered what secrets lie behind the rarest and most treasured African artworks? The kind of pieces imbued with the weight of history, culture, and spirit all at once.

These creations weren't made just to be admired, they served purposes—spiritual, social, political—and each one has a unique tale to tell.

Sadly many of these rare artworks are hidden away in vaults, galleries, or private collections, far from their original homes. Some have been lost and found again, while others remain mysterious, sparking debates about ownership, legacy, and cultural pride.

A vigorous dialogue between heritage and contemporaneity is essential if the past is to preserved by contemporary generations for posterity. 

Only by revisiting sites of memory, can these reclamation expeditions infuse new modes of recollection and (post)memory, viewed through the lens of the contemporary social and cultural landscape.

And in light of this urgency, the post-1994 democratic government has made it a priority to restore dignity to those who were dehumanised by colonial and apartheid-era practices; a laudable effort in the face of rampant corruption within the art world in regards to illicit antiquities trade.

Recently, through the the Exile Repatriation Project and the Reburial of Khoi and San Ancestral Human Remains Initiatives, the government has spearheaded a revolutionary approach to reclaiming lost heritage by returning the remains of 58 ancestors.

There remains a vast array of misrepresentations and artefacts that remain to be repatriated, for instance the The Lydenburg Heads; a set of seven terracotta heads accidentally discovered by a ten-year-old boy in the South African town of Lydenburg. 

Should contemporary historians and artists reposition The Lydenburg Heads in their authentic African cultural  context, and repatriate from Iziko Museum in Cape Town to their communities whilst renaming them appropriately without disputes? 

Would this approach open old wounds or foster an inter-generational dialogue between those who shaped our cultural landscape and those addressing today’s urgency to redress falsifications and erasure thereof?

Excoriating The Wound and the World: On Khahliso’s ‘At Virtue’s Zone’

At Virtue's Zone

It is not helpless, it is not hopeless, it is just being portrayed that way. Without us paying attention, they will have nothing. Without us paying them for our attention, they will earn nothing. Without us bending over backwards to please them, they will break. Without us wanting to be just like them to be just like them to be just like them, their self image will shatter. Without us affording them the quality of anothers discomfort, there palaces will crumble. Without us conspiring and conforming with them, shelling out our cold finger cash to fund the completion of their high rise egos, there will be no more theaters of war no more cinemas of celluloid pain no more carbon copy shopping streets of fat ass consumers suffering from diminished muscle mass no more websites wiping clean our consciousness no more playgrounds for political savagery no more selling us choice when we realize that there is not much to actually choose from Without us being present they will be left to bite their fingernails down to the cuticles. Without us attending their feast they will still continue to be cannibals but will have less meat to pick off the bone. Without us they, the providers of helplessness and givers of hopelessness will be confronted by a new found silence one where the only sound to be heard will be that of their own heavy labored breathing alone and without us.

***

Joshua Baumgarten 

Re(Thinking) Artistic Praxis - NEW Imagineers (Jalal Toufic)

 

Jalal Toufic in (Vampires), proposes that death is not a future event but a condition in which we already exist while physically alive. He also asserts that we constantly receive signals from versions of ourselves dwelling in the realm of the undead.

Politics, religion, social phenomena, colonialism and its irrevocable gestures, incisions that transform man without the possibility of reversal, and the instincts that arise from them, continue to inspire artistic practices of many artists of colour. 

This seems more attuned to what Jalal Toufic calls “the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster,” when grief and care of many beings who have crossed the boundary between life and death have taken a spiritual dynamic and reverence.

What then, is death when there are the un-dead?

Is death a state of continuous life at a level of decay, an inversion towards the negative, a way of undoing the orchestrated linearity of being?

The Unnerving Politics In Ayanda Mabulu’s Art

When do artists express their disdain for political systems governing everyday existence with extractionist impunity and nihilistic tendencies of self-gratification and enrichment? Do artists slash their canvases in rage or somber contemplation of ends, to the means by which devastation is crafted and executed?

A first encounter with Ayanda Mabulu’s work at Kalashnikov Gallery in Braamfontein left my senses unruffled by the splattered angst, and that iconic work depicted none other than the messianic Nelson Mandela laying dead on Winnnie Mandela’s matriarchal lap. 

Her maternal posture, devastated about the loss of sites of their intimate lives, detached from their own historical significance within the hierarchy of political importance; attest to the tone of the artist’s temperament when it comes to shattering social taboos.

The gallery was then dominated by this work amidst the cluttered walls of its miniature maze of rooms that felt more like an underground bunker partitions, and among other were further examinations of the state of a nation in disarray.

And what unnerved me was the artist’s interpretations of the South African mourned stalwart, as a helpless naked lump of ageing flesh slain in a political circus depicted in the assumed meaning of other pieces staring the situation in the countries political trajectory.

 

His many works detailing the fragilities of political egos, their mangled reflections bearing infinite witness to a world in which people and their ideas are captured, stand as testaments that art can jar and rip open scabs of a sedated yet wounded menial populace, faced with indignant barbarity. 

But, there is also a seductive immediacy of a graffiti like improvisation that lingers in paintings such as the LUCKY STAR series, delivering subversive political idioms, dissecting social complexities of this country with a non-hypocritical yet indignant eye.

As it seemed to offer insight into our infamously sycophantic leaders with a distinct penchant for disgust, his works often expose dysfuctionalities of political systems and their violence as the overarching theme that characterise SA in recent years.

The near collage technique that repurpose inherited emblems of power, speaks from framed voices that are personal, yet equally shaped by collective experiences of a despondent populace watching the vulgar comedy of errors engulf the state and the continent at large.

Somewhat a hybrid of western pop art, the art is not conciliatory in any sense but a critical one, shaped by political as well as religious iconography juxtaposed with the ongoing class struggles and mass media violence.

The somewhat multiplied images, amplifying messages that challenge the populist status enjoyed by figures in power, these lucky stars undimmed by scandals are probed by the artist who dares pull the veil from their bare asses.

Within the lineage of dissident art that is politically charged, Ayanda stands as an obscurely relevant artist at the pinnacle of sobering critiques on contemporary climates marked by wars and genocides, curt leaders and exploitation of many by an elite few.

Politically charged yet playfully vulgar gaze, bearing the unseen on canvas as instruments upon which memory relies, these indispensable bodies of men and women of history are laid bare for their nativities and controversies.

Often, his work makes caricatures of struggle stalwarts pitted against the backdrop their other present incarnations, these altered icons of martyrdom (as Winnie and Nelson Mandela were viewed), are slightly vilified by their seemingly unflinching defiance of death and their uncanny stealth for corruption even at old age.

What seems to concern Ayanda is the proliferation of laudatory works that resemble propagandist images of dictators, given undue credit for heroism in the glaring face of starved orphans leering through electric wires around mansion of “liberators of the people”.

Zuma is a perfect muse of imperfection in posture and self-aggrandising actions, his popularity immortalised by his penchant for indigenising mediocre strategies under guise of traditionalism, or the “people’s way”, and Ayanda peels through the facade, exposing cracks in the somewhat enamoured posture of post-apartheid leadership.

His work undeniably presents a microcosm of black Africa as championed by the affluent who passed into their oppressors’ shoes, clones into replicas of western colonial posture without any preamble to make their “new whiteness” comfortable.

Ayanda’s visions become a vessel for the world’s untold, hidden behind decorum and protocols, the sordid betrayals of liberation ideas by men standing on the shoulders of giants whilst pissing the revolutionary tradition down clogged drains.

Each image’s inter-subjectivity cannot be understood solely through habits of subjective references and analysis, the normative recognition of semblances, but only through delving into each figure’s concealed characters. 

Pigments of moral decay and obscene displays of uncensored and callous gluttony, pseudo-machismo suited and seated on pedestals overlooking entangled realities of wealth and poverty; these theme of access and inconspicuous consumption function both symbolically and practically.

Englobing the conscious and the unconscious rebellions aroused by continued plunder by these elites, there are renditions of presidents satirised as the joker or the vampire, images that require a poetic imagination to dissect their meaning.

Resonant meanings are dispersed throughout his work, with newspaper clippings lending factuality, and commercial brands replicas outfitted to expose ulterior, not as outpours rage alone but forms of atonement for being willing victims to the domination of our collective psyche as black South Africans.

Far beyond those serenely majestic landscapes of rurality, this artist seems obsessed with inner mounds of debris left looking like calcified skins on bones exhausted by culling, each painted stroke of a sinew stretching across vast bodies decomposed by greed.

Through his work, the artist reveals diverse metamorphoses of revered personages in light of their current collapse into treachery and self-deification. The characters in his paintings elude traditional thought patterns and categories because they seem other-worldly, although each bearing recognisable resemblance to known figures.

Inspired by mythology, pop, and everyday culture, as well as cultural-historical references, Ayanda continues to carve a niche for art that unravels the seams of those gowns of power, clad by clown in castles usurped through other people’s blood.

 And this uncanny visual device also serves as a microscopic view of the persons concerned, activating their pasts, interweaving it with the present; the artist questioning the art world's rules of engagement with subjects while simultaneously challenging expectations and interpretations.

 

***

 

Images Sourced Online 

Writer

you art a lone figure violently slashing pages

writing a bridge between messy souls

a diary of conflicts and absurdities 

a metaphor for a congregation that is suspended between devotion and restraint

***

 

within a world engineered for rationality we bring to the fore entities that have long remained unseen or excluded—from fine particles and seismic waves to data and marginalized beings. 

our resolve solely seeks to dismantle the existing order that has hierarchized all forms of existence.

arising beyond conditions of creation that arise precisely “out of sight”,
ours is a creative way to bring the structure of experimental practices of art, 
paving a way of perceiving the world and sensing existence—
an experiential condition where environment, identity, and memory intersect.

Art In (COLOUR)

 

Much of history left profound emotional scars on the historicity of many cultures and any research on African values, creativity and ancestral practices aligns with a desire to reinvent the misconception and conservative notion that people of colour lack the spiritual acumen to conceive and comprehend art.

The common narrative has been that sites of memory such as museums should only be the preserve of white supremacist history that is both personal to many white and universally resonant with other projects of colonial displacement of various people of the land.

It become essential for any thinker to begin probing the boundaries between the mundane and the mystical as created by the artefacts in these places, the images, the antiquated furnishings and models clad in garments thought to reimagine the past.

Instead of indulging nostalgia, many artists of colour endeavour to reactivate marginalized cultural memories, backdropped by a vision of "ancestrality”, continually navigating a plethora of coaxed memories, others replicated and censored by veneers of self-illusory joys.

This act of artistically re-imagining sites of memory is a mode of inquiry into the intersection between physical and psychological impacts of such sites; a form of séance in relation to how spiritualism permeates art as a tool that captures times and spaces.

Falsifications of historical events and the ways in which identities of black people have been staged over time are falling apart at the seams however, and this mirrors how our silences are instruments and sites of racial anxiety which must be destabilised by confrontations, academic or artistic.

This cultural annexations of the past have left dissent perspectives on the value of monuments and other colonial sites of the oppressor’s visions of the past, yet it remains upon the shoulders of artists to examine how colonialism has shaped the ways museums, archives and other institutions of knowledge are perceived and understood, revealing the immaterial (and lack of material evidence of the colonised) scars imposed by systemic violence.

Debates surrounding the restitution of cultural heritage taken during colonial periods have intensified, accompanied by a growing recognition of persistent social injustices in society, yet while academics and museum professionals have led much of the discussion, artists  must play a role in expanding conversations around decoloniality, restitution, and reparative justice. 

In a time when traditional values are being lost under the pressure of consumerism; class, ethnicity, gender and many other factors that all too often result in social exclusion emerge. Those subjected to intersecting forms of discrimination such as racism, colonial trauma and brutality, perceive the role of colonial monuments, museums and their artefacts as entrenching memories of oppression, where blackness is confronted on all side by erasure.

Concerned with these entrenched hierarchies and their invisible role in shaping the world around us, artists of colour continue to forge connections between non-Western cultures and erased cultures of colonised people, often in ways that challenge conventional delineations and the Eurocentric gaze.

These artists provide examinations of the psychic conflict which results from the desire to both belong to and resist a society which denies blackness even as it affirms its inferiority, exploring boundaries between environment, politics and the personal which are constantly shifting.

 

Their work often leans toward forms of reprieve, towards possibilities of uplift after downfall, often in the context of the historic and ongoing oppression of Black people and the politics of their representation at the centre of global monoculture. 

Their work even dares to examine propensities for self-hate among people of colour (the oppressed), their self-destructive habits, and other patterns of social activity to analyse the nature of individual personalities. 

Yet, this form of solidarity with the oppressed is increasingly corroded by discriminatory practices and rhetoric that promote western monoculture, and only dissent and the generative potential of collective resistance can be the sole mode of confronting our collective mis-representations as obscured identities.

Often, these artists turn to atmospheres and residues that social practices leave behind; probing what persists in shadow, where light and darkness intertwine with notions of both individual and collective memory.

Like a poet reciting their words, the act of reading is a declarative gesture of presence, reclaiming the notion of memory as a dissident mode to critique norms of memory, conveying a sense of both precariousness and vulnerability, experimentation and ingenuity.

And contending with memory’s resistance to categorization, artists, writers and poets of colour often invoke alternate temporalities, amplifying their creatively transgressive voices and fostering critical conversations around identity and dissent.

Theirs is a sensitive attunement to histories that remain excluded from official narratives, but that are contained and conveyed by nature, buildings, and landscapes and gravesites where unnamed ancestors are buried. Through words and other crafted methodologies of reflecting on memory, artists often have to summon histories of colonial resistance,

Vandalising the status quo and its foundations. Yet these acts of ruination constitute a quiet defiance, a deep confidence in the poetics of lived experience, deeply rooted in the history of the land and those to whom they belong.

What counts as truth as espoused by science, for instance? Science is not a conclusive system but a subjective construction—a temporary attempt to impose order on something that ultimately remains unknowable.

But in what ways can art expand and safeguard the language of truth and the process of truth-telling in an era of falsifications and non-truths?

To safeguard this reverence of truth as a spiritual force, fostering psychological and physical healing simply through presence and exposure, artist use various rituals, resurrecting diverse cultural matrices shaped by resistance and creativity, narratives that are languorous, humorous and somewhat melancholic.

The fault line between what we think we know and what eludes our understanding, tests our perception and dismantles its boundaries, and it is precisely in not knowing that the imagination begins.

Often reworking popular formats into speculative, allegorical forms, the artist new trajectory is now towards investigating how built environments embody histories of forced migration and displacement and exploring colonial intent and possibilities for infrastructures of knowledge that evolved into falsities that haunt today's rediscovered truths.

And as the global discourse around reparations maintains a negotiation between museums and other governmental bodies and communities for the return of cultural objects, artists question the intent of mechanisms of contemporary preservation. Are museums best places for the looted heritage of victims of colonial plunder?

Although there have been several instances of successful returns made possible by these inter-institutional collaborations, there remains a vast array of valid and legitimate criticisms of their shortcomings in addressing the wishes of affected communities, who are often left in the margins. 

Museums have long been recognised as custodians of imperial legacies, eliciting sustained critique and repeated calls for their deconstruction. Attempts to address these entangled and often contested pasts have generated both significant critique and meaningful collaboration. 

The dissident artists seeks to critically engage with this paradox, posing the question of what further strategies and frameworks might be developed to advance the transformative potential of museums in the present.

Crucially, these disparate creative practitioners take a comprehensive and obsessive questioning of why there aren’t any architecturally resilient infrastructure created for intellectual and cultural heritage of people of African descent?

Colonial artists produced some of the earliest depictions of Indigenous and enslaved people of Southern Africa —idealised scenes that obscure the violence of colonialism. They also painted elaborate hunting still lifes and portraits of patrons whose fortunes derived from imperial trade and slavery, which populate many museum walls, exposing the operations of the white gaze.

And as whiteness often seems a reactionary society strongly influenced by the church and the fascist past rooted in white supremacy, it begs one to confront the dissolution of this myth at all its enclaves; from the monumental churches and museums, to the states littered across landscapes of usurped lands.

But to prove the non-durability and bad craftsmanship that goes into projects that purport to commemorate collective memories of black folk, it has also become essential to investigate these meagre spaces in contrast to the vandalised monuments erected under the auspices of the colonialist historian and religionists.

For the dissent artists confronting dissonant heritage, a number of pivotal questions should be addressed to reimagine the realities of division and colonial oppression from the lens of conquest, as the past remains a contested space where we can exist not as conquerors or observers, but as participants in an ongoing dialogue of meaning. 

But to sense anew the pulse of the present that flows through every living thing, dissident art should transform into an agent of self-definition and resistance, it must transform personal longing into a public cultural expression; a moment suspended between past and possibility, where the act of creation and recreation mean the broken bits of an illusive past and its truths.

And in order to respond with these colonial artefacts and images from our own archives as people of colour is a collective project of confrontation, confronting erasure and censure, creating a space of resonance within the past through the present, where the past and future exist in communion with the deep rhythms of the possible.

It is a confrontation of grief that often forces art to return to the traces left behind by what is lost, striving to combine empathy with the impossible. This creative ritual is a critical process of mourning that embraces both the personal and collective dimensions of traumatic experiences, akin a family archive and the collective dimension of a shared heritage.

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Art By: Harmonia Rosale