Stevenson
14.05 - 25.06.2022

At a cavernous eatery for carnivores in Johannesburg’s Parktown suburb, visual artist Mawande Ka Zenzile asks for the black candle lighting the table to be replaced with a white one. When ordering his rooibos tea, with two bags in the pot, he asks that the waiter refer to him as “Mkhulu” (grandfather, elder). 

Before he leaves his seat a final time that night, another waiter – who is either undergoing or has already completed her spiritual training – comes to the table to make her presence known to Ka Zenzile.

Six solo shows deep with Stevenson Gallery, Ka Zenzile’s latest and seventh exhibition, Nqanda nanga’manzi engene’ndlini, comprises painting, sculpture, installation and performance. The cornerstones of his artistic praxis persist in this body of work: using cow dung-based paints on canvas, transforming exhibition spaces floor-to-ceiling, layered text, knee-high stone walls. 

Mawande Ka Zenzile, Nqanda nanga’manzi engene’ndlini, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Stevenson.

In the centre of the first room at Stevenson’s Johannesburg gallery space, a bell rests on a low, rectangular, marble-like platform which is set lengthways. On the other end of the platform, on a white plinth, two white-gloved hands attached to sticks beckon as a hooded [stuffed] chicken adjacent to them keeps guard of a darkened portal by way of a painting on the wall behind it.

The second room’s floor is covered with a thick layer of dark, red-tinged earth that shows marks of where feet have passed most frequently. It is the manifestation of how we, the viewers, have chosen to move and from where we have chosen to view. 

An Egyptian goose [stuffed] cranes its neck to watch us with a single eye as we come in. Its other eye is bandaged shut. A walking stick lies on a red carpet, between the goose and a golden nest and at the goose’s golden feet. 

Mawande Ka Zenzile, Nqanda nanga’manzi engene’ndlini, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Stevenson.

We enter the final room of Nqanda nanga’manzi engene’ndlini’ from the middle of the rectangular room’s longer ends. On either side of the room, quarter metre high stone walls demarcate what we can safely assume are izindlu (houses) referred to in the exhibition’s title. Three wheelbarrows with stones in them stand as though they were in the process of building the walls, perhaps higher, and have been disturbed by our presence. 

There are seven paintings on the walls, just in this space. The full scale of each of them can only be appreciated from across one or both of the structures. 

Ka Zenzile sees his role as an intermediary for us, the viewers. “I think the exhibition space also becomes a canvas; [it] becomes a work of its own. And so I am interested in accompanying the audience into the space and trying to find a way to mediate this movement so that they can easily access what is installed. I wanted them to engage with the work; simultaneously being inside and outside, going closer and stepping back. I wanted to somehow mediate the movement within the space.”

The depths to which Ka Zenzile ventures into territories he’s explored previously and his intimacy with the imagined viewer are what set Nqanda nanga’manzi engene’ndlini apart. In two encounters, one in person and another on the phone, Ka Zenzile laid out some of the creative and spiritual concerns that occupy him most. “I’ve been weird since I was a child,” Ka Zenzile says. “I’ve never had people that I would call close friends, but I could make friends with everybody. So a sense of confidence has always been instilled in me since I was a baby.”

Mawande Ka Zenzile, Isango elimxinwa, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Stevenson.

“I never need an external affirmation to do anything, to exist. I’ve always been independent in my own life. I left home very early, around 15 [years old] and lived by myself.”

In his younger years, even as a student at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art, Ka Zenzile was an activist; he identifies himself as having been radical then. By 2015, he was writing his Master’s dissertation at the same institution, without a supervisor for guidance. “I was thrown in the limbo. I had to find my own way,” he remembers.

“Something happened to me,” Ka Zenzile says searchingly. “It’s kind of like an awakening or a mystical experience that just changed everything. It just created havoc. I couldn’t identify with a lot of things. I couldn’t even identify with the Mawande Ka Zenzile that used to paint in a certain way. There was a shift in the vocabulary. There was a shift in the concerns that I have when it comes to my work or creativity. Just after that, there was a time where everything was revealed. Where I could understand things in a broader sense rather than just what was in front of me.”

Some of these revelations came from casting away his crutches.

“Do you know when you are angry to the point where you are crippled, you can’t do anything? I felt that I was liberated from that. I forgave myself a long time ago, that moment when I [realised] that I don’t have to feel pressured by anything. To a point where I did not see a need to feel vicitimised by anything.” 

Spirituality and artistic practice are symbiotic for the artist, who was part of the South African Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, has shown at the South African National Gallery and completed a string of coveted international residencies. “I’ve never made a split between my creativity and my spiritual life,” he says. “It [spirituality] has always been central. I’ve always been driven by the desire to create. The desire to make is such a spiritual thing.”

Mawande Ka Zenzile, Redemptive love, 2022.

There’s humour at one’s own expense when trying to decide whether the dung and store bought paint mixtures on Ka Zenxzile’s canvases are peeling, or whether this was an intentional peephole into underlying layers. It comes with the realisation that the artist has made us, the viewers,  the subjects of our own inquiry. 

Nqanda nanga’manzi engene’ndlini is hosted in an affluent Johannesburg suburb that most of the city’s dwellers don’t have immediate access to. Leaving our footprints at this exhibition might denote a measure of our privilege. Ka Zenzile sees his work as artist intertwined with his existence as itola, a spiritual role in his Xhosa culture he describes as being “like a shaman. Itola is like a foreseer. Itola is a diviner. Not necessarily a sangoma because itola remains itola. More like a prophet, a knowledge keeper. More like a prophet.” Exploring the outer limits of what can be said to exist and what not is perhaps the greatest privilege of all. One the limitations we set on our own lives might not allow us to experience as unfettered as Ka Zenzile can.