In Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, until March 9, 2015.
Badisa, 2012.
About:
Mohau Modisakeng was born in Soweto, Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1987, and now lives and works between the city of his birth and Cape Town.
“Those who are playing football there now are walking over dead bodies. Their euphoria and the deaths that occurred there during the hostel violence of the 1990s is a dichotomy that, even as the artist stands in his studio today, is too great to comprehend. He was a boy of about seven then, wandering around, as young children his age do, when he saw dead bodies on the ground on a football ground.”
Inzilho, 2013 (video).
“This is an attempt at paraphrasing a memory from Mohau Modisakeng’s childhood. It does not make the memory any less real. My only sin is that I have made the memory exist today as opposed to the past. At the nucleus of Mohau Modisakeng’s young career in the arts is the obsession to inhabit the contours of colonial and post-colonial history, deciphering its serpentine nuances, drawing out its violence, moulding them into aesthetically pleasing objects and prophesying the present and the future. The way in which he moulds the violence into sculptures, photographs and video has an almost romantic connotation to it.”
Untitled, 2012.
“The work doesn’t start off with an attempt to portray violence. The work responds elementarily to the history of the black body within the (South) African context, which in most cases cannot be removed from the violence of the apartheid era and the early 90s. I think the work becomes mesmerizing because although we might recognise history as our past, the body is indifferent to social changes so it remembers,” Mohau explains.
Untitled (Fence), 2014.
“It is not only violence that Mohau’s work concerns itself with, unlike performance artists who bash themselves about to no purpose at all, he understands the importance and effects of it. In 2013, at an exhibition titled Inzilo (mourning), Mohau commented that South Africa is a country caught in a state of mourning. It is caught between trying to remember, forget and move on.”
(quotes from article in Africasacountry written by Dudumalingani Mqombothi | June 26th, 2014)
Ditaola, 2014.
Courtesy Brundyn +, Cape Town.