BKhz Gallery
02.07 - 20.08.2022
The smell of it hits us first. Warmth, then softness, then green. We’re yanked from Johannesburg’s swanky, suburban air and into places only our memories know. Where you go, I cannot say, for I, too, have been transported. All this and we have not yet set foot inside Zandile Tshabalala’s Lovers In A Secret Place: the first solo South African exhibition for the already internationally acclaimed Soweto-born, University of Witwatersrand-educated painter.
Zandile Tshabalala, Lovers In A Secret Place installation view. Courtesy of the artist and BKhz Gallery. Photograph by Bernard Brand.
Set foot inside we do, and – like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland – we arrive in what Zandile calls “an unstructured paradise.” The once-pastel walled, minimalist space that is Banele Khoza’s BKHz Gallery has metamorphosed into a garden: the walls are a succulent green, the floor: a carpet of grass made smooth by the footsteps of visitors before us. I wonder what rabbit holes of romance they went down. Guiding us through the exhibition is a landscaped pathway: fire-sticks, delicious monsters, bamboo palms and other waxen plants sink us deeper into Zandile’s ‘secret place.’
Then there are the ‘lovers’. They are everywhere in this garden, almost life-sized. And they know we’re here: occasionally breaking through the canvas to stare directly at us, implicating us in their secret, as if to say: “Now that you’ve found us, what will you do? Who will you tell? Is this not you?” They are a woman painted deep black with devastatingly soft eyes, siren-red nails, and a fine black fur coat, as well as a ghost of a masculine figure – unpainted, matte white, neither negative space nor positive idea.
Zandile Tshabalala, The Aftermath of a Bitter Sweet Love, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and BKhz Gallery.
In the first scene, we encounter this feminine protagonist stretched regally along a couch in a flamingo-pink feathered robe, luminous pink shoes, and Vladimir Tretchikoff’s Chinese Girl in its popularised millennial form of scatter cushion at her feet. While her posture suggests rest, her sullen gaze pushes through the canvas and travels elsewhere. The impression: her image may be here, but she is not.
The next few scenes hint at where she has travelled. Up a grassy ramp to the proverbial top of the garden, we’re met with scenes of dance, touch, longing and listlessness. It is intimacy in montage. A small fan stands imperceptibly in a corner, circulating both grassy air and nostalgic triggers. To the left, the lovers sit almost hidden from view behind tall, fine grass: the woman draped in her black fur coat nested, child-like, in the arms of her lover. She stares directly at us, only this time more coyly, a hint of ecstasy in her smiling eyes.
Directly opposite this nesting, we see the lovers dance what we imagine to be a slow dance to a song in their heads, for there are only plants and stolen glances in this garden. That dance reaches its climax in the scene alongside it, as we see the woman tilted back in the arms of her lover: head thrown back in joy, eyes closed this time. There is both grace and reckless abandon in their dance. We are mere voyeurs to this part: love’s headiness.
Over almost as soon as it started, we then find ourselves face-to-face with a scene of longing. Something has gone missing. The woman sits in the foreground, resting her head on the back of a chair we cannot see, her black fur now cloaking her, as if to comfort her. She gazes out at us, while the figure of her lover stands some distance behind her, gazing in her direction. Whether he is really there, or his presence is being felt by our protagonist, we’re not told. They’re not touching. This much we are shown.
Slightly bruised, we are led down a short corridor into another space. If we’ve been meandering through a lovers’ garden all along, we now find ourselves in a lovers’ cave. The walls are brilliant red (like her nails), the garden is sparse and rockier, and a single branch stands from floor to ceiling. On opposite walls are two different lovers: one masculine, one feminine, both naked. The feminine figure has her arms thrown up behind her head, her hips sashaying to one side. The masculine figure is poised upright – his gaze transfixed on the woman opposite him.
There is nothing suggestive about this space. Here stands desire: both carnal and foundational.
- Zandile Tshabalala, Lover’s Dance II, 2022.
- Zandile Tshabalala, Lover’s Dance I, 2022.
Leaving this Garden of Eden-esque cave, the garden path has one last thing to let us in on. By design, it is the only piece of text in the entire exhibition, save for the show’s title at the entrance and an apt “No Entry” sign on an office door. It is an Upile Chisala poem, posted up untitled – the way one might find love’s declarations etched into walls or trees. It reads:
Standing
In the middle of our very own
miracle, Something precious
Is happening between us, darling.And it’s no secret
That we both come from troubled
soil And cruel weather.
But you, brave in your devotion, Take
my hand
And I, full of care,
Take yours.Together,
We soften cursed earth.
Together,
We grow what little love we can.We’d rather be ready and wrong
Than miss a good chance
At a good love
Like a new love, Zandile Tshabalala’s Lovers In A Secret Place proves to be equal parts mesmerising, mysterious, and foreboding. With distinct nods to her influences Kerry-James Marshall, Njideka Akunyili-Crosby, Cinga Samson, Nandipha Mntambo and Henri Rousseau, Tshabalala creates a world in which her protagonist’s singularity is palpable.
Her centering of the black femme protagonist brings to mind the ethos of American multimedia artist, Arthur Jafa, who – in discussing his film’s work – describes the importance of the public being brought into the creator’s world to shift perspectives of the creator and their world, and to be sensitised to it.
Tshabalala resists the casting of Black women in tropes of submissiveness, pain or sameness. At the same time, she does not overcorrect for history’s misrepresentations – to rescue her race and gender from either Race or Gender. Her scenes seem deeply subjective. They assert the right to individual life: simply to love and to grieve. They are deeply relatable.
Her creation of this world is both tender and technically profound. Tshabalala’s ability to reproduce textures as fine as blades of grass and wisps of fur around flat yet charismatic figures – all in acrylics and oils – achieves something masterful.In short: Zandile Tshabalala paints what love’s daydreams feel like.
Lovers In A Secret Place gives us the privilege of stepping into Tshabalala’s own dreamscape. In love’s own sneaky, contagious way, we are invited to spill our own secrets, to drift between the artist’s memories and our own as we wade through many of the same indigenous plants that feature in the paintings. Left to discern meaning for ourselves in an exhibition with few words, we leave as we entered: a little dazed and a little giddy. Isn’t that how love first hits in any event? Something warm, something soft, something green.