Weaving Futures

 

Images By: Khahliso Matela

ISOLATION (Idiot) - A Khahliso Matela Video Poem

 Isolation.

As humanity we are existing in some unprecedented time when we all to confine ourselves.

Endeavor to a degree of isolation of SELF that is self-inflicted and to face the walls. 

The walls that keep us safe at times,  but the walls that seem to be closing in on us.

My name is Khahliso Matela. (Flat)

I am a South African based Video Artist

What do we project on the walls within?

And in our isolation, we will find some connection.

And that is the nature of my art)

And that is the nature of my art the joy and connectivity of our human-ness

That which makes the same walls that keep the human IN

(And as we project on these pasts, and the presents and possible futures?

Together may we project a beauty better than that we have created.)

Isolation.

And as social beings, we all know, that we exist to validate each others’ existence.

But now ISOLATION

Is a mode of self-rediscovery

A space for introspection.

My projections

Are those worlds that project on the darkness in the walls.

In an eternal strife to find connectivity of our species, we project unto these minds a hope.

That your isolation, will mirror mine, 

(so that we might )

In order to launch a better struggle against ISOLATION that is ours.

And in my ISOLATION, though proving that we are one…

BUT WE ARE NOT.

Run Beloved, Run...

 Khahliso Matela Video Poem

Noluthando! Noluthando! He angrily calls after she who beheld love. 

Yet, when a malevolent voice yells that name in such wry animosity and repudiation, how contradictory and deprecating it is for the beloved who is running away in terror?

In densely contrasted imagery, a face and bulging eyes a woman sleeks through glaring paleness of a void, as though encased in a dream-room made of powdery oval walls, through which she aught find an escape.

This face, and semblance of her frightened demeanour, embodies the continued tyranny against femininity as expressed by misogynistic social systems still playing a great part in our everyday lives.

This video poem is a meditation on a moment expressing pent up menace of rage, the menace of the male gaze and an interpretation of masculine antimony towards fragility, how maleness seen solely expressed by terrifying womanhood to express its virile stature.

A Poem Of Sorts In July

Hinted conflicts of a sundered soul 

Forge multiple personas and a vessel 

That navigates between disparate languages 

And ambiguities embedded in scenes of squalor,

Whistling dirges for mounting a serpent of time

Numbly without shield or sword.

Delving into the unpredictability of lived horrors and

Palpable tensions of salvaging wrecks from entangled memories,

What thoughtless wastage of an unnatural order, what 

Breathless fatalism of a new skirmish with dreams of fraternity?

Standing stolid and worn, razing blades of grass

For a furnace brimful of flames in wild waves of peril,

Why blaze a scream when licked by fiery tongues

Sharply scolding like lessons of childhood?

A Memo On LAST DANCER

If what fills my sight is sustained by a “persistence of vision”, then it follows that all expression be an archeology of vision, and those sights that unfold in clear view of the phenomenon of existence.

This excavation of layers from a single explored dimension, looting the visions of their secret rays that fall beyond sight, is but a solemn task weighing upon my art, evolving with the constant grasp of fleeting moments “past”, scaled in the “now” and waiting “to become”.

With each layer revealed, a shadow on a surface appears behind a shadow, and an artist like a child observing shapes on a surface for a time, all seems a mystery bound to every new step taken into an unknown.

These shadows, like unattended presences, are remnants of frozen moments that comprise a unison observed, and thus these video poems are but a mirage of an attended spectacle of dance in its many unseen layers.

And as only few objects in this material world carry light in its entirety, a variety of frequencies determine their parameters of visibility and invisibility, therefore, these video poems concern themselves with invisibilities of that “which is”.

Syllables of light, spectral and drawing beyond the limits of a rainbow, these video poems attempt to expose threads between each speck, each form as it reflects on rays that bend to its will.

 

These are featureless silhouettes of an event that is transient yet visible, and its aura spread across a plane shared by livid souls in euphoria of communal engagement.

Each layer is an affirmation of multiplicities of reality, this reality, and a moment sliced from a dizzying time recalling itself, again and again, again into a whirl and nauseated dance of euphoric madness.

GHOST SMOKER - A Khahliso Matela Video Poem

A Note GHOST SMOKER

Should I be concerned with literalism of images or words? I think not. 

Because in essence, art is not constructed with strict parameters of its own definitions, art is embedded with new surprises that emerge only when engaged with at any independent perceptual level. 

All perceptual dynamics of assembling meaning from an ensemble of symbols patterned and sustained in sequences that allow my persistence of vision to construct further meanings, all these function to define what IS my idea of that specific art.

And what if a medley of sounds, escaping from this confined flux merge with textures of these images in colorful chaos?

What if that is which I perceive as a GHOST SMOKER?

Small Talks With Artists