Joël Mpah Dooh
Untitled, 2012.
About:
Joël Mpah Dooh’s ‘Let’s Take a Walk’ is characterised by an “ordinariness” – or inflections of “ordinariness” – that makes for enticing viewing.
After Work, 2013.
The writer and thinker, and Dooh’s fellow Cameroonian, Achille Mbembe, used this word in a recent public presentation in which he questioned whether South African artists had engaged this quality of “ordinariness” in their work in the post-1994 period. I am unable completely to explicate Mbembe’s line of thinking in the space of this review, but what can be said is that Dooh’s ‘Let’s Take a Walk’ is immersed, in my view, in this “ordinary” as a matter of course and, in this immersion, often achieves the extraordinary in the recording of the minute-by-minute minutiae of exchanges in the city.
Joburg Rush, 2012.
Comprising a series of gritty, beautiful mixed-media on aluminum works, two Perspex “shadow” engravings and a wire “shadow” installation, the exhibition traverses a gathering of lived moments that individually and collectively provide an account of the complexities and vagaries of existence in the African city, in this instance – very often it seems – Johannesburg. How is this quality encountered? How is this “ordinariness” manifested? Firstly, through the physical quality of the materials used.
Joubert Park, 2012.
Secondly, through the imaging of language, whether a single word, numbers, a fragment of a sentence or a snatching of intimate and unruly conversation. And thirdly, through the construction of spaces that are seemingly immediately recognisable and yet also beyond my grasp, within which a multitude of characters perform their lives. Much of this mixture of surety and elusiveness is present in the imaged conversations too, and here the ordinariness coalesces as a series of histories, of moments. Lifestyle in Town (2012) and Creating New Heroes (2012), both emerging from a process of painting, burnishing and a grinding/polishing out of the aluminum and paint, epitomise these small (and larger) histories. Speech bubbles and rectangular scene frames provide a readily accessible series of visual cues with the calligraphic sprawling of French, Englishes and perhaps yet to be named emerging languages scrawled across these and other works.
