STANDARD BANK YOUNG ARTIST AWARD EXHIBITION 2015: KEMANG WA LEHULERE, HISTORY WILL BREAK YOUR HEART
Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum
Until September 2, 2015
About:
This year’s prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art was awarded to Kemang Wa Lehulere. This annual award includes sponsorships towards an exhibition which starts its country wide tour at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown before traveling on to Nelson Mandela Bay.
In History will break your heart, Kemang Wa Lehulere continues his current exploration of marginalized South African artists. In his award exhibition, he creates a dialogue between his own work and the work of veteran fine artists Ernest Mancoba, Gladys Mgudlandlu and writer Rolfes Robert Reginald Dhlomo. Wa Lehulere’s used the medium of video, installation and found artifacts (including works on paper by Mgudladlu which were purchased on auction) to tell the stories of these three artists and in doing so highlights the importance of their contribution to art and writing in South Africa. Wa Lehulere’s exhibition imparts back to these forgotten artists the deserved acknowledgment that they deserve.
‘History will Break your Heart’ is visual artist Kemang Wa Lehulere’s, latest exhibition. Composed of installations, drawings, video, sculpture and performance, the exhibition is a fractured, layered and deeply personal narrative that recalls the past in order to rethink the present. Wa Lehulere was awarded the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist Award for 2015.
“I feel like I have to contextualise a few things because people get confused. And of course audiences vary. So we’re not on the same page, all of us. The show is read differently in different cities, according to the audiences and the space.”
Born in Gugulethu and raised by his aunt, Wa Lehuluere has been moving between art and activism and rebelling against the education system since the school bell rang. “My teacher noticed that I was struggling with the curriculum, English in particular, I could not relate to Shakespeare as works of art, they just didn’t speak to me,” he said. “So she began taking books out of the library for me, which is when I started discovering black writers. By the time I arrived at university I was already critical of education as a package, as well as black writers who were erased,” he said.”(quotes from Africa is a Country website, July 2015)