The Walk At Dusk

A Khahliso Matela Video Poem

Home Of A Million Ghosts

A Khahliso Matela Video Poem

Johannesburg is a city of many people with a variety of cultures interacting at all levels of existence. This video poem is an ode to those ghosts of dead dreams and the pulsating life of a city that eats its own young.

The Silence And Sounds Of Dusk

Do The Two Eyes Have To See The Same Thing?

This video poem is an exercise at stretching the limits sight as a perceptive faculty employed to capture memory data for our cranial vaults. Though the two sets of frames, the artist is invoking what he calls THE DUALISM OF SIGHT – an analogy that draws from the notion of ‘persistence of vision’.

Premised on an inquiry of the possibility for each eye can be able to perceive its own chosen of ‘field of vision’, the first sequences are depiction of the same sunset viewed at different times of its occurrence, while the second merely composes the same sunset to create dually variant fields of vision.

Attempting to pose on an idea that retinal manipulation is perhaps possible, where each eye can choose to decipher its own set of data from a viewed reality, independent of spatio-temporal limitations, as well the cage of the four side frame, the artists is also questioning the extend of independence in the act of sight – and perception as a holistic phenomenon.

By: Khahliso Matela
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Koloi - A Photo Series

 Images By: Khahliso Matela

Blurred - 7 Portraits

Images By: Tebogo Mgodoyi

BeeThorn's Street Determined

Another Khahliso Matela Video Poem.

EVERYTHING AT ALL TIMES AND ALL THINGS AT ONCE

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The Irrational Library - To Know That You Know Nothing

A Minor Appreciation - Part 1

Would the sound of our times be chimney-smoked chorales of thunderous nuclear bombs, roaring a doomed acoustic testimony of humanity’s self-destructive instincts?

Will this sound be a polished portion of a sacred lie about civility and progress, about man’s overtures of victory over his own vices?

When bombs and rifle serenades are far too familiar to many a war-torn country and home, street wars and economic suicides are a lyric of our age of decay of course, and music must provide the melancholy soundtrack and The Irrational Library’s latest offering is that score that settles the score for the under-scored.

Machines are turning everyone into freeloaders and new-age hobos, a neo-bohemianism emerging on the fringes of a decaying bourgeoisie.

Cults of altruism are going beyond tree-hugging, where man no longer saves trees but himself from fires consuming dust, avoiding dancing in radioactive rain.

But when all is said and done in closet-revolutions, what will be the final din at the back of a skull when the iron curtain falls on the rot of social super-structures?

It is when Joshua and his tribe sings walls to the ground, reminding us that missile sizes are vicarious armor for presidential erectile dysfunctions, that BlackLives are comedia del’arte played out in legislative lavatories with Trumpian lyricism of racist verbiage and tragic reliefs.

Yet, in their wild and sullen art, they forge a symphony of the discordant whine of today’s eternal wail unto forbidden gods and glamorous demons of a shadow world.

And I am left to wonder, is Haarlem yet another ghetto haunted by a million of Whitman’s ghosts or a harem for spilled egos who strip naked before museum vaults and library entrances?

The long standing tradition of music composed to poetic lyricism has always permeated aural traditions of man for millennia, and it does make adequate logical precedent for the ushering of an automated age to be lauded with hymnals, even though algorithmic, which clank and his of grundged up jazz craze of a dystopic psychology of EVERYTHING AT ALL TIMES AND ALL THINGS AT ONCE.

At first, a video montage I was teased with from their upcoming album simply knotted my guts, left me gnawing my last knuckle before puking this review on screen.

And it being their second offering since the inaugural NOW THAT WE STILL CAN, the density of a suffocating world stinks through the monitors blurring lines like…………..

The Jewry is out in full throttle towards defending Palestinian liberties, mongrel slogans of racist mutes sinking to the background static of defunct TV stations.

And the many euthanized voices of the dis(eased) awaken with each beat and bass kick that molds rock and mortar of souls, somehow into an aged cry, old as man’s states and dynasties hauntingly climbing an invisible ladder.

A halo on a mess, this is what the music is.  Sanctification of roughed up nomads lost in a time without time. A remix of parallel times, all stewed up into a brew gurgling in a rusty throat of morphemic saxophone.  

Resuscitated beatniks are jostling among deranged ravers and the music of a grey bearded oracle with a band of misfits stand atop the pile burning towards ceilings of power. The ludicrous sincerity of rhythm keeping the paces of joy and pain in synch; is lucid.

While a Fela Kutian jinx keeps sprinkling voodoo rhythms to a blown wind of protest, we see faces of poets who knew that they knew nothing, the song becoming an ode of the deadened voices of dissent.

And what bizarre visual poetry of evangelized massed falling on carpeted floors, the spectacles juxtaposed with cannibal lectures by men of god, and deranged youths sending “A Warning To The World Of False Poets Who Preach…”

It is this cool madness of KNOWING THAT YOU KNOW NOTHING, like experimented fragments of a wounded dream carrying a link to a musical genetic memory borne only by martyrs, that wails like church gossip in a preacher’s heart? Yet what oratory is this, I ask myself, as I sit watching this montage of outdated and out of date party-mongers in euphoric disregard.

I can only be nostalgic for future past, and through this a performance of the first single from their upcoming album, raged and arranged to quarrel industrial machines, I find myself waiting patiently for September 20^th 2019 release of their EAATAATAO.