Category: local

Saw Meleko Mokgosi’s stunning Pax Kaffraria (2010 – 2014) at the Memorial Art Gallery today. It is “an eight-chapter project that takes Botswana, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe as case studies, and articulates questions around issues of national identification, colonial history, globalization, trans-nationality, whiteness, African-ness, and post-colonial aesthetics.” Had the opportunity to listen to Mokgosi, who was born in Francistown, Botswana, talk about his work.

He explained how the project is a response to rising nationalism and xenophobia. Although we understand the fluidity of borders and identity more than ever before, the world is becoming increasingly nationalistic and shutting down. People invest emotions in objects such as flags and in privileges that they can access as citizens of nation-states. Is it because jouissance is limited and therefore any curtailment of enjoyment is blamed on the other, the outsider?

Mokgosi construes nationalism as highly masculine and is interested in the role of women in African liberation movements. Not only are they missing from such histories, but they continue to exist without existing – a condition that he represents through visual redaction. He wants to impress upon us that subjectivity is real, not just a theoretical exercise. It’s something that’s felt in the body.

Mokgosi’s work dealts with problems of representation i.e. painting Africans without essentializing them. He wants to background blackness and use black bodies allegorically. He finds semiotic representations to be more open-ended, whereas linguistics are finite. He is aware of the need to unlearn Eurocentric history, which is written, sequential and based on contextual analysis. History can also be oral and non-linear, as it in Africa and other parts of the world.

Art itself is strongly Eurocentric: “we all learn to paint by painting white people.” The techniques and primary colors used to paint skin are all meant to recreate white skin. Mokgosi refuses to use those techniques. He doesn’t use white Gesso as a base and rather than treat painting as an additive process, he removes layers of color. He has developed his own artistic process and language.

He also prefers more nuanced emotional registers. Obviously, he avoids the stereotypical angry black man or the sad black woman, in fact, he avoids any over-performance by his Africans subjects. He loves representations of middle-class African lives, where nothing much is happening.

He uses negative space to engage with the viewer, without overwhelming her. Inspired by Max Beckmann, a German painter and sculptor, Mokgosi is not limited by realism in dealing with space, which he sees as having a pedagogical, political function. Many of his large scale compositions are informed by the 19th century French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau, who painted classical mythology.

Although Mokgosi is in constant dialogue with how cultures/people change as a result of contact with colonizers, he’s also aware of the fact that postcolonialism itself is an American academy object.

I spoke to him afterwards and shared how the idea of unlearning history and developing one’s own language to articulate one’s identity resonated deeply with me. I come from another ex-colony, the subcontinent. He was elated and told me that’s where many of these ideas come from, ideas such as subalternity. “There are many wise people in that part of the world,” he said. I found out later that he’s using Gayatri Spivak’s work in his new project “Democratic Intuition” in which he aims to unpack love and understand democracy.