Photographer Mikhailia Petersen’s engagement with SA’s perennial housing crisis is born of personal experience. Her mother has been on a social housing waiting list for 15 years — the subject of a portraiture series, We Were Trying To Build a Home. Due to her involvement with Reclaim The City (RTC), photographing residents of the buildings that have been occupied in the movement’s campaign for affordable housing in Cape Town, Petersen is even more committed to this issue.
Now, in collaboration with Wolff Architects and Artists4Equity, she has donned a curatorial hat to stage an exhibition in support of RTC. HOME features pieces that have been donated, or created specifically for the show, by 16 artists working in a range of mediums. Some of them address the topic directly, while others complicate and broaden our understanding of what “home” might mean.
Bella Knemeyer’s monochromatic When Form Follows Fortitude, for instance, appears at first to be an experiment in texture and geometry. On closer inspection, we see that it is anything but abstract and is actually a detail of a built structure — the corner of a window that could be located in a swish Cape Town Airbnb pad or in Cissie Gool House, whose residents have been locked in a legal battle with the city for years over their occupation of an unused building (formerly the Woodstock Hospital) designated for low-cost housing.
Nabeeha Mohamed’s mixed media collage Shelf borrows from still life conventions to depict the sparse but dignified life that the occupiers have established for themselves, despite not having access to electricity or running water. Visitors to the exhibition may be reminded of this reality when stumbling over Haroon Gunn-Salie’s floor-level installation, Half Full, an enamel bowl holding collected rainwater.
The scope of the exhibition extends beyond a narrowly Capetonian anxiety about housing and homelessness through artists whose associations with home take us elsewhere. Thero Makepe’s photograph, Merapelo II, was taken in the Anglican cathedral in Gaborone, while Akshar Maganbeharie conjures a highveld storm — or perhaps just the feeling of urban chaos — in his charcoal and pastel Meditations on Randburg. Johno Mellish’s untitled image of the mural on a humble house front could be set anywhere.
While housing is a public matter, home is private; to borrow from Njabulo Ndebele, one might say that housing is spectacle, while home is ordinary. Home is a place for intimacy, as portrayed in Michaela Younge’s While You Were Sleeping. Talia Ramkilawan’s Love me Harder also links home to sex and sexuality.
The figure in Ramkilawan’s tapestry, like that in Alka Dass’ Bite the Apple Eve, calls to mind a celebration of the “badly behaved woman”; there is perhaps an allusive homage here to the rebellious matriarchs leading the Cape Town occupations, or even to Petersen and her partner in crime for HOME, Hannah Kaniki, the driving force behind Artists4Equity.
Kaniki created this platform five years ago as a rejection of the elitism that often attaches itself to the arts scene, seeking to “reimagine art as a tool for liberation, redistribution, and systemic change”. Through online auctions and physical exhibitions, Artists4Equity sells art and “creative labour” to provide “material support for urgent causes”.
While a celebratory tone marked the opening of HOME last month, there is a solemnity to its mission — an uneasy affective combination captured in the riotous joy of Erin Chaplin’s yellow flowers and their ominous title, Storm Coming. Kyle Hendri Strydom’s ceramic sculpture To Burn Is To Let Go introduces a funerary note that is echoed in Mishal Weston’s Blaauw Bones.
The catalogue statement drives home a connection between this morbid undercurrent and housing in SA, arguing that the “contested patch” of land that constitutes our country is “full to bursting with grave dirt”, so that “to live here, now, is to make domestic among the dead: a homestead erected on a funeral pyre”. In Cape Town, especially, a brutal history is compounded by “apartheid-era spatial planning that holds the city in a neocolonial death grip”. Finding a home in such a place means reclaiming the city.
• HOME is at Wolff Architects (136 Buitengracht Street) until August 19, with a walkabout and film screening on August 2.
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