We do not look anymore at things that tickled our fancy

A review of the Curators’ Exhibition of the maiden Stellenbosch Triennial

By Kelvin Haizel

Who has time for what tickles their fancy when there is a desperate need for more radical solutions to our precarious condition! Yet, that is what Bernard Akoi-Jackson (Ph.D.), co-curator of the maiden Stellenbosch Triennial seems to expect of us. He writes “Being so busied with bidding other’s will, we do not look anymore at the things that tickled our fancy”[i]. I contend that it is exactly what we should do; bid Others’ will. An Other with a big ‘O’ for that matter. Not many of us have enough carbohydrates to convert into energy to waste on mere pleasures of our yellow sclerae. Today, even the flaneur of 19th century Paris will recognize he risks being swamped by yellow vests in any attempt at merely observing the workers’ protest. So indeed we must bid the will of Others, it is on Others’ will that we can claim any act of true emancipation. Alterity does not necessarily lack authority, its will and by extension, authority is dispersed and distributed among us all. And so we will not be tickled by the feathers of the ‘belly-full’ at the risk of unsettling increasing systemic gaps.  That said, lets not mistaken this subtle poke to equate a flaw of the entire exhibition, there is more promise in the curatorial intent than I have given credit to. Tomorrow There Will Be More Of Us, the title of the Triennial and the guiding ethos around which artists are invited to contribute, spews more guts than merely to what tickles our fancy. Although we also know that many of the claims made by these fanciful art projects with no actual heart to carry through – curators and artists alike – only make us feel good about ourselves than to instigate any real change.

Figure 1 Curators' Exhibition. 2020. Exhibition View(Interior). Image: Kelvin Haizel

However, we can jump right into the exhibition with that out of the way!

‘Curators’ Exhibition’, ‘From the Vault’, ‘On the Cusp’ and ‘Concepts of Freedom’ are the four main exhibitions under the Triennial which opened to the public on 11th February 2020. The initial intent was to have the exhibitions up until 30th April 2020 but had to close to public on 18^th march 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Because I participated in the Curators’ Exhibition and had a fairly intimate engagement with most of the projects and artists through their installation process, I find it honest to speak to this part of the Triennial than the others.

The Curators’ Exhibition features 20 contemporary artists from Africa showing works that permit all senses to be tickled at least once. Some humorous, witty, spontaneous, and in a continuous state of flux; others politically charged, gloomy, overwhelming and even sublime upon encounter. There are spaces created to experience the abject and there are contemplative spaces. The multiplicity of experiences offered by the range of media make sure to have you escape the every day (at least for a second) into an imaginative world of possibilities beyond the colored lines in Stellenbosch. If this was at the end of the rabbit hole, Alice would even wonder if indeed this is the land where the horrors of apartheid were engineered, tested, exported, and systemically carried out to its furthest traumatizing absurdities. The former Woodmill now played host to 20 artists’ projects that almost had to compete with the sheer scale of the massive industrial architecture. The projects experienced here are far from modest in terms of scale. The only exception is Bronwyn Katz’s video and sculptural installation Wees Gegroet and Ouma respectively. One would not be wrong in assuming the title of the show to be “go large or go home”. 

Helen Nabukenya’s monumental fabric tapestries Abalamu Baseesa Gwaka float over your head upon entry from one of the two symmetrically opposite exits of the exhibition hall as though they are clouds. Leading to Zyma Amien’s installation of angelic gowns http:404 Not Found made out of 20x20 meters of fabric, which hangs from the trusses. Tracy Thompson’s circular plantain fufu petals Woven Scales hang adjacent Amien’s. Towards the opposite exit from Nabukenya’s installation is I Am You, drapes of differently colored and textured lace fabrics mounted on step concentric rings by Igshaan Adams. What do all the works have in common? If you ask me, I will say, although tomorrow is perpetually elusive, it still needs to be fabricated and these brilliant artists found a way to literally do just that. They seem to be visions of fabricated futures. Working with a group of women from her community in Kampala, Nabukenya shows us that collectively we can colour the clouds. We are assured by Zyma that we can discard the erroneous notion that resources are too scarce to satisfy all of us. She proposes that if the heavens got overly crowded and God sent down 404 naked angels, each one of them can be comfortably clothed with ease. And though Thompson’s fufu might not be ideal for an angelic buffet, it further reassures us that we have enough to even spare for the aesthetics of plasticity. Through such experiments, she simultaneously explores the paradoxes of life, death, transformational and mutational characteristics embedded at the core of material manipulation. These are all speculative visions of a tomorrow that is being woven.

Surely it is not only Thompson who reminds us of death. Death as a common denominator to our mortal quests is hinted at almost every corner of the exhibition. Some artists remind us that our mortality might just be another reason to be cautious in our optimism towards the future. It is echoed in the most obvious sense in Ibrahim Mahama’s Strangers in a Line, an installation of 10 ginormous coffins made from scrap wood stained with bitumen. Kelvin Haizel’s Birdcall961: Appendix C equally points us in a similar direction. An expansive light-drawing which references an airplane hijacking that crashed in the Comoros Island in 1996, leading to the death of 115 occupants of the Ethiopian airline flight 961. A further hint at one of the possible outcomes if one is bent on reaching their destination at all costs. Perhaps what was chasing them necessitated how fast they had to run, or in this case to crash. Bernard Akoi-Jackson writes “For whom acts of deliberation and patience are no longer virtues, what needs to be done always needs to be done, damning all costs”. Sometimes that is what one needs to ably poke at the real, encounter death, and if the universe is on your side you arrest life again. A Zombie-like figure fashioned from an adult body-scale mannequin and rubber tubes by Patrick Bongoy, Trail (Figure 2), sits midway between Mahama and Haizel. The uncanny sculptural piece installed like a paused figure in motion is suggestive of another kind of death even though evidently it is materially inanimate. It alludes to a subject in a permanently trancient state. The kind that results from being denied any form of visibility in order to move. It exists within the interstices, the invisible, the living-dead, the undead. Like Schrödinger’s cat, it stubbornly insists on being both alive and dead at the same time, inhabiting what became known as a state of indeterminacy.[ii] It equally exemplifies the political and racial underclass whose labour keeps the pristineness of Stellenbosch in such clinically white beauty. The eeriness of such structural whiteness is perhaps most felt upon entering Euridice Kala’s proposition of a “‘new’ habitat” Untitled: Still we are…ancestral people built on site. Of course, the artist intends this to reflect 3 principles for decolonizing architecture. She cites the round exterior, democratic points of view and multiplicity of use as the means to do so. However, I am particularly taken by how it injects local politics into what could be described as aesthetics of light and space art. The aperture created to allow natural light in could be a sly quotation of a James Turrell, although we can equally acknowledge that the land on which Kala’s habitat sits is marked by traumatic dispossession that is still a site of contestation. Whiteness here might equate death to Others. 

Figure 2  Curators' Exhibition. 2020. Exhibition View(Interior). Image: Kelvin Haizel

If Kala’s eerily whitewashed space typifies the whiteness of Stellenbosch, Stacey Gillian Abe’s Sylvia’s Letters to My Future Self 2017-ongoing invites us to another kind of habitat; a shack built with found corrugated roofing sheets and repurposed materials. The shack is the default shelter for the underclass in the townships in South Africa. Which is not so different from the likes of shelter for segregated ghettos in close proximity to developing urban cities across the globe. Abe does not only bait the predominantly wealthy spectators on the triennial’s ‘guest list’ to romanticize the perilous living conditions of the black and colored; she jolts us all into confronting the historical antecedents of such places by evoking the ghost of Sylvia Boston (Salem Washington County’s first black slave). There is no power in Abe’s shack, and you might see Silvia if you have the guts to stay there long enough after dark. Spooky right! Don’t be scared yet! Walk back into the factory and go stand at the very center of Sethembilie Msezane’s red circular room filled with lit candles, a plait of hair, and a bell. Say a word here and you will run for cover with all the vibrations bouncing off the metal walls right back at you.

Figure 3 Curators' Exhibition. 2020. Exhibition View(exterior). Image: Kelvin Haizel

Of course, we cannot lose sight of the many pieces that directly speak to power, the one thing that drives us all, perhaps! Reshma Chhiba proposes an installation of ten red-hot tongues fashioned out of steel frames, fabric, cushion stuffing, cotton and nylon thread. Titled Mother Tongues, it immediately speaks to the acknowledgment of and acceptance of difference as a starting point, while at the same time the consistency of the sizes alludes to a general sense of re-inscribed vision of equality. The red is as much aesthetic as it is charged with codes of gender politics and revolution. The site intervention by Victor Ehikhamenor Power House literally takes on the Woodmill’s now-defunct generator house in a critique of power. If you have seen any Instagram post of a group of spectators turned participators playing a game, know that it is Ronald Muchatuta inciting a form of collaboration that beckons all to get involved. He asks us to be kids again, to be inventive with no apologies, to face our dreams and leave reality to cowards[iii].

It is only in facing the unreasonableness of our dreams that new visions can be crafted into reality. Tomorrow is indeed for dreamers who speak to power unapologetically. So whether we are fabricating new futures, or speaking to optimistic visions, let us first dream in spite of recurring currents. What seems to be urgent is how to direct our visions towards total emancipation. It is important to be there, to be present with, and to act in will of all, to bid the will of Others. If you ask me;

“I wanna be there when the people start to turn it around

When they triumph over poverty

I wanna be there when the people win the battle against AIDS

I wanna lend a hand

I wanna be there for the alcoholic

I wanna be there for the drug addict

I wanna be there for the victims of violence and abuse

I wanna lend a hand

Send me”

 Hugh Masekela. “Thuma Mina” 

Notes

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[i] See Khanyisile Mbongwa and Bernard Akoi-Jackon: Stellenbosch Triennale: Tomorrow There Will Be More Of Us. Edited by Khanyisile Mbongwa (Cape Town, with Tip Africa Publishing Ltd), Exhibition catalog. 

[ii] See Daniel Rubinstein: The Grin of Schrödinger’s Cat: Quantum Photography and the Limits of Representation. Edited by Daniel Rubinstein, Johnny Golding & Andy Fisher (Birmingham, the United Kingdom with ARTicle Press). p.g.39.
[iii] I borrow this thought from Slavoj Zizek who concludes a paper in defence of psychoanalysis stating “…as Lacan put it, the Truth has the structure of a fiction: what appears in the guise of dreaming, or even daydreaming, is sometimes the truth on whose repression social reality itself is founded. Therein resides the ultimate lesson of The Interpretation of Dreams: reality is for those who cannot sustain the dream”. Slavoj Zizek: Freud Lives! Lacan.com. 25 May 2006. Accessed on 8 April 2020 https://www.lacan.com/zizfre.htm