RUINS - Images By Khahliso Matela

 

A Letter Dated August 16, 2012

As men who died like heroes of a life of quite misery and

Terrors enforced by compulsive usurpers of might, 

A joke was envied by many daring fate, 

Pronouncing life as duty won

All infallibly and blindly vain, 

Wedding death in a bed of echoes

Here with complicated impulses, 

Beloved stores of un-judged sins

Lingered in corridors asking for names erased with faceless graves 

Those added unto piles and dunes of earth’s entrails, 

Divorced from rock

And people mourning that morning 

Of an agreeable crime smeared in death

***

Eyes shut to barking and shrill sirens 

Summoning rage and delirium, 

To glistening bodies of bloodied comrades…

Hostile lords wrestling with their conscience and nonchalance

Sipped dementia from cupped hands of slain workers

Without fear of God or man

Followed by lawmen 

Sauntering leisurely among drifting dusts

Those other men were seen as suspicious game in an artful way

In this art of unstable sight and profit, 

Where flatlands before the rise become a wave - 

An ocean of souls in disarray, 

Glossed by diabolical elements and

Facts beseeching their cries 

Inquisitive like those of their newborn’s eyes

Who bore the asylum of hostel dwelling with a nagging dream

***

Loved ones watched and told of more primitive gunslingers

Who popped holes deceiving like ulcers 

Bitten by mites and silicosis,

On that ecclesiastical day of unrest ended with souls marred 

For their un-budging aims for better party and semblances of life

It was with blankets and coats 

In broken stitches of camouflage inadequate

Among shrubs and trees in thorough insanity of heat waves and bullets

A twinkling moment 

When scarcely a dozen armed in uniformity 

Fired live ammunition unto lives lived as incapable fruit of broken trees

***

It was then, like now, as we scale ruins that we found buried bones

From centuries saddled with tyranny, with no impasse nor victories

But the enslaved, tainted with a reality of complicity of raping their mother

Disgraced as fools in a paradise that despises us the trusting recipients of pain

***

On that fateful day

Glints of sweat were as eyes that gleamed in recognition of death and

A thousand recounted massacres played out like mirages 

In a heat wave that rose with dust and gravel

War-men glancing at clocks ticking a countdown

To those blemished moments of terror conducted with candour

With indignant manners of beasts scanning the horizon

Souls tamed as problematic were dealt a blow with sputtering of rapid fire

Immortal souls slain for an exchange between fathers 

And their born slave sons nurturing dreams of dark shafts and bold rock

Yet, all in a brief moment of pandemonium about the dying and resuscitated 

To view their departure for seven minutes in a world seeming phantom

Marikana became a death-zone and deadest creation of cruelty 

That craved punishment and varnished coffins

For all bodies mauled in an absence of grandiose tombs and rewards

On Malcolm Jiyane ART.

It’s almost an axiom to say South African artist Malcolm Jiyane is a genius, with a versatile range of expression and extraordinary artistic creations.

His mythical caricatured painted scenes and collages of discordant sensibilities, have produced a visceral interpretation of contemporary life, satirically depicted,  with a theatricality that emphasises the similitude of everyday life for many in South Africa - a commentary on the mundanity of repetitive mechanical existence.

I first encountered Malcolm’s artwork WINGS, on the cover of Tumi Mogorosi’s trans-expressive musical journey – Sanctum Santorum, a lushly coloured painting depicting a tumultuous yet serenely calm life in momentum, a complex mess of history personal and communal, a form of layering of social realities onto a single plane of perception.

Over time, I began to understand that his craft, nurtured in extraordinarily less-than-auspicious surroundings of Soweto,  had been born from seeds sown by various mentors, artists and musicians, blossoming a fertile imagination that would always be in awe of unrestrained life pulsating around him.

In an era when Black artists have had to contend and overcome cynicism and indifference from the art world, while producing works that don’t feel rushed or truncated, Jiyane’s playful yet darkly reflective works continue to feature a variety of materials (realities) plastered on canvas or recycled surfaces, inspiring new glimpses into alternate lives of men and objects.

Enamoured with far-ranging narratives in contention with contemporary representational inaccuracies, tapered with his own dystopian reinterpretations,  the images are imbued with uncertainties about life itself, a grappling with paradoxes of black experiences in an anti-black world.

And it no surprise that his art seems influenced by many styles that resonate with today’s temperament,  deciphering codes of past symbols and encrypting them onto new tapestries, visual concoctions that channel vast cultures and their mysteries in a beguiling way.

With a deliciously dark panache, mysteriously sensitive to ideas of “home”, a confining space which nevertheless liberates, Jiyane connects the mythological importance of such spaces with depictions of those who find shelter in whatever crude formations (shack architecture) of derelict squatter camps.

Far removed from fleeting trends of contemporary artistic articulation of beauty in squalor, his is a form of reminiscence, embalming of gutter existence, enroute to a dynamic realm which liberates blackness from the anathematic to the cosmic.

Spirited away, head-spun in euphoria at his latest collection of works, I find myself contemplating how he seems to have mastered pre-verbal modes of transmitting feelings, exploring the mundane through art, bringing essences to the fore, peeling an onion of a tear jerking disaster country.

These Images seem to crudely chime with each other without obscuring their root essences, too intense not to be critiques on race, class and gender; they summon their own atmosphere, alluringly immediate in the emotional responses they solicit.

The spirit of these places, locations, far removed from the tangible, but caving in on the liminal and in-sensorial, are themes that permeate his craft even through music, where he often fuses disparate sonic traditions into a cacophony of new soundscapes.

His is an art that is constantly scrutinising the lived experiences of blackness in South Africa, blackness as an endangered state of being, precariously lingering between imminent death or continued strife and disgrace.

Despite his experimental nature, self-transforming and self-displacing these lived experiences are not wasted against bourgeoisie obsession with the vulgar in black lives if his artworks’ contents are misunderstood, it might be  because of an innate urge to elude compartmentization, classification in terms of art as product of commerce.

Prohibitively and radically resistant to quick analysis, his art is always devoted to the comical gallery of life,  scrutinising his own experiences with those of his community, his kin, neighbours and even time, past, presented for a future.

What is reality but a multiplicity? 

And this recurring theme ultimately speaks of art as reminder of all that remains, and by making fluid connection with his past, he is jolting us in the present towards thinking vividly about an unknown/hidden/ignored dimensions of the human experience.

Fragmented relationships with the past woven into his growing oeuvre of transcendental imagery foreshadow a deteriorating world, filled with misconceived stories that make human existence worth the novel adventure it purports to be. 

And actually, as is visible in the prescient analogies ever present in Malcolm’s art, our present societal dementia is thematic and inevitable, with blurred visions of possible futures populating his canvases.

My quizzical enchantment with his art stems from an obsession with enmeshed and entangled narratives that are driven by something dream-like, a somnambulism of sort, where the artist is but a medium in a much greater séance with other alternate variables.

Where mind and body are automatons for a masterful purpose, improvisational observers from the vantage point of both creator and his creation merged and framed in a spectacle on frozen time.

Images by: The Artist

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?