Two exhibitions on display at Cape Town’s blank projects straddle European art history and the African present day.
This connection occurs, first, on the level of method and material. Shaun Motsi’s Browns, four deceptively simple oil paintings of squares of nutty chocolate, invokes the Renaissance techniques of brunaille (monochrome painting using only shades of brown) and trompe l’oeil (a three-dimensional effect on a two-dimensional surface). By contrast, most of the works in Kresiah Mukwazhi’s Body Count have been created using what is probably a world first: the artist has stretched hundreds of bra straps across canvas to produce colourful striated patterns.
To collect her material, Mukwazhi had to smuggle second-hand bras into Zimbabwe, where, a note accompanying the exhibition tells us, “the display of women’s underwear” is “considered controversial or even taboo if worn revealingly, its wearer judged according to notions of purity and eligibility”.
The policing of women’s bodies and of the clothing they wear is an almost universal phenomenon; the tension between the puritanical and the erotic also underscores the male gaze that has been fundamental to Western art history. So Mukwazhi’s challenge to the “misogynistic trope” that both emphasises and stigmatises women’s sexuality via fashion need not be specific to her Zimbabwean context. Yet there is something about the binary construction of the chaste/promiscuous woman, and the violence reinforcing it, that is — statistically — particularly pathological in Southern Africa.
The title of Mukwazhi’s exhibition, employing “body count” as a reference to killing but also to the number of sexual partners a person has had, results in a conceptual conflation of death and sex. But this is not the literary conceit of Liebestod (the German phrase fusing love and death, as in Romeo and Juliet) or the euphemism of orgasm as la petite mort (French for “the little death”). Instead these European cultural allusions are jettisoned for a much more trenchant, grim exposure of “the dangerous double-standard” that “reinforces systemic gender-based discrimination and violence”.
The gruesome image in Mukwazhi’s mixed media work The unrest of Movado mourns the murder of a sex worker. Her non-figurative pieces may be more visually appealing; from a distance the bra straps disappear into the abstraction of colour and line. They are, however, no less striking in their treatment of “the female body as a political instrument and a contested site upon which the power dynamics of patriarchal society are played out”.
Motsi, also Zimbabwean by birth, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives and works between Berlin and Amsterdam. His response to a different form of objectification — what in his previous work has been referred to as “the institutionalisation of black subjectivity” — is pursued via levity rather than a sombre treatment of the topic.
This is achieved through a combination of theoretical and visual playfulness. Motsi cites the Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant, who presented a postcolonial demand for “the right to opacity for everyone”: that is to say, cultural or racial difference does not need to be fully understood or “transparent” in order to be respected and protected. This has become a point of reference in legal discourse, but it also has significant purchase in the contemporary art world.
For Motsi, it is the basis of “a poetics of non-disclosure” — a “defence of the opaque as a strategy for representation”. The viewer does not need to (but also does not “get to”) have either the painter or the painterly subject fully explained, quantified or interpreted. Glissard presents opacity as an ethical framework for celebrating and accommodating diversity, according to which “I no longer have to ‘understand’ the other, that is, to reduce him to the model of my own transparency, in order to live with this other or to build something with him”.
It is an assertion with urgent application in the increasingly diverse but also worryingly nativist Europe in which Motsi creates his work. But Motsi does not seek to lecture. Rather whimsically, he also affirms that “what you see is what you get”, so in a sense we really are just looking at pictures of chocolate. And don’t look too closely — or all you will see is “loose brushwork”, as the illusion “dissolves into a layered mass of mark-making”.
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