WHATIFTHEWORLD X KRONE
11.06 - 24.09.2022
When I was a child, we would draw the outline of a house on a piece of paper and call it home — four straight lines to make a square and a triangle to make a roof. We would pierce the paper with a pen as we told of the dramas that took place there. If you told enough stories, with enough vim, eventually the house would disintegrate — a strange tension between creation and destruction. Writing about Otobong Nkanga’s work, Limits of Mapping (2009-10), in which Nkanga pierces a map of fictional countries with wooden rods, Yvette Mutumba notes that “everytime a needle penetrates matter it simultaneously destroys and creates: it produces a whole, which in itself is a new construction.” With each hole we poked in our little game of house, we constructed new selves.
Turiya Magadlela, Ixesha I & II, 2018 and Bed 1: “Imbede enyobanayo?” Bed 2: “Ibedi yezimanga?”, 2018. Courtesy of WITW X KRONE.
In the exhibition Home Strange Home, stories of home are told through material. Objects are stitched together, glued, arranged and patched — speaking to the repair that follows brokenness as well as ties that bring us closer to each other. Bleach, woven steel wool, yarn, razor wire, ash, Umbhaco, bed frames and Bible pages — organic and inorganic substances that are glazed, rusting, porous and intoxicating. Each of these materials reveals a connection to home in known and peculiar ways.
Home Strange Home is a collaboration between WHATIFTHEWORLD and Reservoir Projects, with exhibiting artists Kamyar Bineshtarigh, Stephané E. Conradie, Kirsten Eksteen, Carola Friess, Wezile Harmans, Turiya Magadlela, Asemahle Ntlonti and Inga Somdyala. Taking instruction from artist Tokwarse Dyson’s reflections on how “properties of energy, space and scale can form networks of liberation,” I read the exhibition as a critical study of abstraction and materiality, and how both can be useful in narrating our most intimate stories. Here, I’m thinking alongside author Maria Lind, where abstraction is a tool of non-identity, a tool that may reside within social forms but doesn’t need an identifiable social form itself. A tool that disseminates and multiplies.
For Somdyala, social forms are invoked through Xhosa traditions. It begins with the colour red. Red ochre. Red cloth. Ibomvu. He tells me, “Red appears as a pigment in red ochre, red oxide or red soil and in material such as the red striped abakwetha blanket or umbhaco in red. The first settler historians, explorers and anthropologists dubbed amaXhosa ‘the red blanket people.’” Somdyala’s works reveal how colour and line are not only abstract elements but also material objects. For him, red is a “cultural, social, spiritual lineage and practice. A first line of resistance.” His large-scale installation The Righteous Path II (2022) — made with umbhaco, cotton, sea salt and steel — meditates on practices of healing while also considering the connection to home through ritual. His Scorched Earth flag works are elegant abstractions: a dissection of the canvas into three rectangles of varying shades rests on three greyish squares that reference land without representing it directly.
Ntlonti and Harmans’ works draw a parallel between “homing” and migration. Ntlonti’s paintings Khaya khulu (2022) reflect the walls of houses in her childhood hometown of Ngcobo, Eastern Cape, from which her family migrated. Each layer of paint removed represents the cycles of life that can be told through the aged and patinated walls of the place she once called home. The titles of the works are a nod to iKhaya elikhulu as the main home — even though one might have left ikhaya, it remains a place of refuge, a place of return… the place where izinyanya are laid to rest.
In South Africa, of course, the connection between home and work cannot be tethered. The migrant labour system uprooted men and women and severed their connections to home and community, forcing them to live in hostels and low-quality temporary houses with no access to basic resources. Many are taken hostage by the system of capitalism which discards those without work and exploits those who work as cogs in the ever-churning machine. Harmans’ work, We Regret to Inform You (2022) meditates on these tensions. To begin a conversation on the difficulties of searching for work and opportunities, he collected envelopes and letters of rejection from family and friends. This process has evolved to include envelopes aged and hand-written with the words we regret to inform you. He tells me: “I let them rest in a coffee and tea and for a few days I let them dry.” For him, coffee and tea take him back to his childhood when these beverages were a bedrock of all kinds of conversations, good and bad.
Harmans’ work These Voices recalls Khanyisile Mbongwa’s research on irhanga — alleyways between homes in many townships across the country. While laying bare the oppressive architecture of apartheid, these alleyways also function as public spaces for self-realisation and community. Made from mutton cloth and hand-sewed bandages, written in ink, These Voices reads as a kind of non-permanent irhanga that wraps the viewer with words of affirmation — Love alone is sufficient, some days I wake up and I have to introduce myself to life, how to breathe, how to live, how to love.
Writing in The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics, Louis Onuorah Chude-Sokei speaks of the ways in which ‘blending’ threatens notions of absolute difference by virtue of what it produces — the creole, the hybrid, the neither/nor. Bineshtarigh’s paintings indicate the space of neither/nor. Through an exploration of Arabic-Afrikaans, a form of Afrikaans written in Arabic script, Bineshtarigh points to language as a system of communication between peoples as well as language as a set of principles based on aesthetic value. Here, the written language surpasses the narrow demand for legibility and challenges John Berger’s character in Woven Sir, who describes writing as “involv[ing] spelling, straight lines, spacing, words leaning the right way, margins, size, legibility, keeping the nib clean, never making blots, and demonstrating on each page of the exercise book the value of good manners.” In these paintings, there are no good manners, only seepage and smudging, recalling author Irit Rogoff’s notion that smudging is a useful metaphor for trespassing borders.
Home Strange Home succeeds in offering a glimpse into how to think concretely about points, lines, surfaces, solids, and dimensions — working them into metaphors for territories, migration and constructions of communities. The exhibition offers an interesting reading of conceptions of home and processes of homing. It challenges naturalistic representations of the home in favour of more nuanced forms, because sometimes four connected straight lines can carry the weight of your childhood memories.