It is not uncommon that I find myself in a group of parents discussing “the way we live now” and bemoaning the effects on children of growing up in a suburban SA family circa 2019.
There is the lack of stamina, strength and fine motor co-ordination — never mind the lack of imagination — that come from a sedentary lifestyle and too much screen time. There is the limited capacity for independence, for going off exploring with other kids, which is a result of staying in a house hidden behind security walls and having parents who are neurotic about child snatching.
“When we were young …” goes the refrain. This is all very well, but such reminiscing can start to blend (especially for white people, although black people are not immune to it) with a certain kind of apartheid nostalgia. Here we are in dangerous territory. To grapple with contemporary complexities — whether these are social, economic, technological or political — should never mean to allow the indulgence of an idealised past.
Still, the postapartheid paradox remains: we have freedom, but the constraints placed on that freedom (most of which are, after all, historically determined and cannot simply be blamed on the manifold shortcomings of the current government) often seem overwhelming. This ambivalence seems to be a driving force in Nhlanhla Nhlapo’s Free (State), one of three exhibitions showing at Lizamore & Associates until March 2 as part of the gallery’s annual mentorship programme.
Nhlapo’s title refers, primarily, to the province he calls home — he hails from the small town of Frankfort — but it also plays with the implications of living “in a free state”. One might even discern an echo of the bitter irony in King Leopold’s cruelly named Congo Free State; indeed, Nhlapo’s work is a response, in part, to the legacy of colonialism not just in SA but across the continent.
It is also, however, very specific to his regional context. Nhlapho borrows the conventions of 17th century Dutch landscape, interior and still-life paintings to great effect as he renders people, scenery, animals and objects with an exquisite hand — but this is far from an “apolitical” portrayal of his surroundings. The artist invokes his family background (his mother and grandmother were domestic workers, and largely absent while he was growing up) as well as the national discourse on land restitution.
In his oil paintings, by turns colourful and sombre, the past hangs heavy in the air even though “rural life” continues with a veneer of tranquility. In his charcoal drawings, by contrast, the atmosphere of a free-but-not-free state is vividly conveyed; they are fragmented, densely allusive, exhilarating but exhausting.
Astonishing photorealism confronts the scrawl of handwritten notes. The phallus is set against the eunuch. A human body has a sheep’s head. The nightmare of the past — dating back centuries, as indicated in clothing from the early colonial period — haunts subsequent generations.
It is tempting to compare the broad scope of this vision to the more intimate world expressed in Alka Dass’s Where Does the Pain Go, When It Goes Away? The material and methods employed by Dass — crocheted doilies, sewing and stitching — suggest a sphere that is more domestic and private, perhaps even self-indulgent. Yet on closer inspection, one realises that, as with Nhlapo, the personal is political.
As the title of one of her pieces declares, Dass is also grappling with “something that happened a long time ago that continues to affect me today”. In her case, this is partly a function of her identity as an Indian South African (with cultural and religious markers — Dass draws on Hindu mythology) but is also more broadly about being a woman of colour who is “not white enough or black enough”.
The third artist in the exhibition is photographer Manyatsa Monyamane, whose Serithi is a celebration of black women’s bodies and their “aura” or energy. Her work seeks to overcome the “erasure of black bodies”, framing her naked subjects such that they declare themselves unerasable: neither vulnerable, nor ashamed, nor fearful, nor objectified. They are not beholden to the gaze of a “hypersexual” society that, argues Monyamane, “discourages the full expression of womanhood”.
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