Modisa Tim Motsomi
Botswana/South Africa
2012.
Statement:
“In my work, I try to emphasise my interest in materiality and the liminal space between beauty and homeliness, loss and gain, fragility and strength, self and other, fact and truth and how these polarities can give insight to the development of both personal narratives and shared(cultural) narratives. By taking aesthetic references from documentations of African rituals as a means of reflecting symbolic gestures relating to rites of passage, and re-appropriating them in my work to create quasi-historic presentations and dioramas I question the implications of shared culture and knowledge .
Through approaching the idea of memory from an allegorical stance that implies it as a sense itself, I use my own body as an tool to reflect the act of ‘remembering’, fictional or otherwise, as an entity with corporeal potential. What results from this is a historical mise-en-scene that is less about fact and rather about an imagined ideal. In the scenarios I hope to create a new aesthetic experience that is both well-known yet equally obscure.
This aspect of my work, I believe, gives and denies entry into understanding the work, and reflects my interest in critiquing the modernist ideal through its own ‘anthropological lens’; a ‘lens’ that emphasizes the constant desire to assert validity through categorising. This is in some way reflected through the fact that although present, the figures I create remain knowingly mute and seemingly unaware (closed eyes) of the fact that they are on view; whilst at the same time they seem to be policing their own secret and fantastical historiographies.”
