Thanks to a thousand Eskom memes, load-shedding jokes and dramatic news headlines about SA’s perennial energy crisis, “darkness” has a somewhat overdetermined metaphorical purchase in our national discourse. If you’ve grown tired of throwaway references to “dark times” in our country — usually implying a vague concatenation of social, economic and political factors, or a general malaise — you could do worse than visit Nicholas Hlobo’s Yongamela Ubumnyama at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg.
The exhibition’s isiXhosa title, which suggests overseeing or presiding over darkness, is usefully ambiguous: who or what is presiding in this way? The God of Genesis? Some unknown creative force? The viewer? Hlobo himself?
The artist notes that this body of work developed from the sense of isolation he experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic. Dwelling in the darkness of loneliness and introspection, he nonetheless sought and discovered joy. This is expressed in the brilliant colours and textures of his multimedia canvases.
His artful slashing and taut stitching with ribbon leaves each work marked by beautiful, bright, arching scars — signs of both wounding and healing.
Hlobo’s signature method, which entails weaving together different materials, is very much evident here. His artful slashing and taut stitching with ribbon leaves each work marked by beautiful, bright, arching scars — signs of both wounding and healing. What signals a new departure, however, is his bold use of acrylic paint; it dances across the canvas, it ripples, it curls. Viewed up close, Hlobo’s brushwork produces a curious effect, a marbled wash of colour scored by thin lines like the veins of a leaf.
The abstraction of Yongamela Ubumnyama is complemented by the distorted realist interiors in Cinthia Sifa Mulanga’s In the Becoming, which is being exhibited concurrently in the Goodman’s Viewing Room space. The female figures who occupy Mulanga’s domestic settings appear caught in contemplative or lethargic states. They may not be altogether trapped in their environment but they are, the artist suggests, constrained by misconceptions and stereotypes relating to beauty and to their identity as black women.
The conflation of racial “blackness” and symbolic (negatively connoted) “darkness” is an all-too-familiar one in the white, Western imagination. Black artists have disrupted this received tradition in various ways. One thinks in particular of Zanele Muholi, whose Somnyama Ngonyama series of photographic self-portraits depicts a hyperbolic, stylised form of blackness; Muholi has stated that she wants to “force the viewer to question their desire to gaze at images of my black figure”.
French artist Mame-Diarra Niang takes a very different approach to subverting the representation of black people, black identity and “blackness” in her new exhibition, Sama Guent Guii, at Stevenson Johannesburg. The title invokes Youssou N’Dour’s haunting song of searching and longing — a reminder that Niang spent much of her childhood in Senegal and Ivory Coast — and is further explicated in a prose poem accompanying the work.
Niang describes herself walking and being preoccupied “with the lingering thought that I knew nothing about the history of my late father and the lineage of my black ancestors; my ancestral memory felt akin to the iridescent surface of a bubble, like a feeling of loss upon awakening from a dream impossible for me to recall. This series feels like the abstract idea that I have of myself, the acceptance that forgetting is also a starting point and a fleeting, necessary memory. Sama Guent Guii, in which my memory is a dream.”
The images that developed from this vanishing revelation are blurred and indistinct portraits. If Muholi satirises the reification of blackness in her self-portraits, Niang’s subjects instead constitute “a refusal to portray blackness”. The style is almost cinematographic, suggesting that moment when a lens is so out of focus that the camera captures only the play of light and colour and refraction, producing a haloed effect.
These ghostlike figures could be from the present or the past; they occupy public streets, classrooms and studios, but they are also configured in the artist’s mind. They are, in fact, self-portraits of a sort. Niang’s poem concludes: “I am the past which reappears / I am these black bodies that I do not recognise / I am this blur / I am made of memory and oblivion”.
• Yongamela Ubumnyama and In the Becoming are at the Goodman Gallery Johannesburg until November 10; Sama Guent Guii is at Stevenson Johannesburg until November 19.
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