africanah.org

Arena for Contemporary African, African-American and Caribbean Art

Author: Athi Mongezeleli Joja

What Does Land Mean for South African’s Culture? Part 1

06/12/18 at 09:03 am

A little reminiscent of the early 1990s Steve Hilton-Barber controversy following the white photographer’s unseemly pictures of naked Sotho initiates (largely an inaccessible site) aroused unflinching backlash from black theatre audiences. Hilton-Barber’s pictures not only instantiated a debased pornotropic and ethnographic palate prevalent in colonial photographic practice but, rather less memorable than the representativity of the disrobed native body, was the fact that Hilton-Barber’s access to the “sacred” site and exposed body of initiates was precisely due to the fact that his family owned those rolling mountains where black rituals were actualized.

Athi Mongezeleli on land politics in South Africa

The Landless People’s Movement outside the Constitutional Court, 14 May 2009 (photographer unknown)

Challenging Appropriation via Scapegoating: Hank Willis Thomas v. Graeme Williams

04/11/18 at 18:02 pm

For his work Gravitas the African American artist Hank Willis Thomas used a photo of South African photographer Graeme Williams. He turned the orginal work into a black and white photo highlighting the image of the children outside the context of the militairy patrol on the bus in the original photo. Williams got furious and called Thomas a thief, Thomas called for reflection but, in the end, removed the work from the fair where it was presented. Stealing or appropriating? A crime or just a commentary?

Athi Mongezeleli Joja brings light to the case.

Hank Willis Thomas, Gravitas, 2018

The state or economies of the South African visual arts industry.

07/10/18 at 19:56 pm

This article of the South African art critic Athi Mongezeleli is a “solidarity criticism” in what appears to be an interesting public provocation about the state or economies of the South African visual arts industry. He reacts on an article of the art historian and curator Thembinkosi Goniwe in the newspaper Main and Guardian.

A work of Mary Sibande at the Joburg Art Fair, 2018, © photo: Alon Skuy

Sabelo Mlangeni’s Umlindelo Wamakholwa

03/09/18 at 08:32 am

The failures of this show are not immediately in the works, but how the curators chose to conceive it. The short-circuiting and catch-phrasing stunts that have come to typify curatorial practice are slowly leading towards sterility. But if we look beyond the show’s slightly unimaginative presentation, Mlangeni’s images intimately and charmingly indicate a complexity in the Zion church, a complexity only a caring artist has.

Athi Mongezeleli Joja on the South African photographer Sabelo Mlangeni

Black Chronicles IV

08/05/18 at 18:51 pm

BChroiclesWellington Majiza, The African Choir. London, 1891. By London Stereoscopic Company. © Hulton ArchiveGetty Images. Courtesy of Hulton Archive, and Autograph ABP, London.

But caught between limits of representational possibilities and the contradiction of colonial representation, here portraiture finds itself in an interesting aporia. That is between an enchanting representation, and the existential reality of knowing oneself as a problem for humanity. This performative contradiction creates problems for the lauded humanizing acts of the photograph as a general conflict in Black Chronicles IV.

Athi Mongezeleli Joja on the travelling exhibition Black Chronicles IV

Wellington Majiza, The African Choir, London 1891. By London Stereoscopic Company.©-Hulton Archive/Getty Images. Courtesy of Hulton Archive and Autograph ABP, London.