Kalashnikovv Gallery
06.08 - 27.08.2022

A little frightened, a little intimidated, plenty excited. The only way to know it would be to walk through it, get lost, and learn to live in it.

That’s Arundhati Roy in her 2019 Arthur Miller “Freedom to Write” lecture, speaking on the universes her stories offer readers. She might as well have been speaking about art galleries in general, and ‘the white-cube’ in particular. That clinical-ish, dystopian-ish space that is meant to be the ‘most comfortable’ setting and ‘ideal’ backdrop for ‘uninterrupted engagement’ with art has always amused me as much as it irks me. 

Whose idea of comfort manifested in white walls and hospital-grade lighting? What happens to a viewer’s freedom to explore, when – in an effort to give maximum space to the artworks – the surrounding emptiness creates objects out of both viewer and art? Why do I feel like I’m inside that part of a movie where a semi-conscious hero must meet their maker – that biblical limbo?

Just off Juta Street on a Saturday morning in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, I step into Kalashnikovv Gallery. The sounds of day-drinking and last night’s ongoing revelries dissolve behind me. I find myself in a quiet, sun-flecked room. It’s just me, the assistant doing an exceptional job of making themselves invisible until needed, and walls dotted with images. 

It feels as if I’ve entered that limbo – half-dream, half-vacuum – at which point I wouldn’t have been surprised to see Morgan Freeman enter stage-right to introduce me to this chapter of my personal void: “FEVER, RETURNS” is all he would say in that Oscar-winning grin, before omnisciently beckoning me to see the works of the artists assembled.

Installation view: Fever, Returns, 2022. Courtesy of Kalashnikovv Gallery.

They are Alka Dass, Tyra Naidoo, and Saaiqa – three South African-Indian artists and among the founding members of Kutti Collective, a growing collective of South African artists with South Asian roots. 

I first encountered their work at an earlier group exhibition, It Means Bitch, at Kalashnikovv’s multi-platform gallery, P72 Project Space. The “It” is a reference to ‘Kutti,’ a loaded term for ‘bitch’ in Hindi and ‘little’ in Bengali. It’s a nod to the collective’s work to expose and subvert the many Indian brands of misogyny and queer-phobia. 

That show commemorated the 19th-Century arrival of Indians in KwaZulu-Natal under Britain’s Indentured Labour Act – the export of Indian workers across the British colonies designed to keep labour supplies up on plantations as the Atlantic Slave Trade was coming to its legal end. This period plunged generations of an entire sub-continent into limbo, where its people would be neither Indian nor African (or Caribbean), but “coolie.”

Curated works included Youlendree Appasamy’s Face-maps – an autobiographical comment on role of colonial and casteist taxonomies in identifying the features of ‘a worthy Hindu woman,’ as well as Katelyn Chetty’s Indentured Labour documents printed on sugar-cane paper – a visceral insight into how our ancestors were classified, renamed, and reduced to a set of productivity specifications.

Youlendree Appasamy, Face Map, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Kutti Collective.

As a direct descendent of indentured Indian labourers and ‘upper-caste’ merchants – and as an Indian woman in constant battle with patriarchal expectations of gender, career and general existence – I cried. 

In truth, I convulsed quietly at the back of the group walkabout, praying my existential tears would pass for hay-fever. That was the sheer power of seeing my people, our histories, and our complications, represented and affirmed.

It Means Bitch did it in dimensions ranging from the autobiographical to the performative. It was an existential justice I hadn’t known I craved so deeply in a cultural economy that, for the most part, renders both the South Asian experience and artist invisible (if not pigeon-holed into turmeric-laced stereotypes). 

So, standing at the entrance to Fever, Returns, I wondered what existential rattling awaited me this time.  

There would be no one to answer that for me. The exhibition statement – a poem written in lines of red, yellow, blue and large gaps of silence – would only offer hints. I scanned it, allowing ideas of “haunting fever dreams,” “karmic prayers,” and “fragmented roots” to take their seats at the back of my mind as I heeded Arundhati Roy’s cue to “walk through it, get lost, and learn to live in it.”

I was drawn to two black-and-white photographs first. One, titled, Where are your gods now? shows a flock of vultures crowded around something we cannot see but presume to be once living, while the second, holding onto hell, shows a boxing bag hanging in someone’s desolate yard. They’re both by Saaiqa, a multidisciplinary artist who describes their work as reflecting “an engagement with the psychological landscape of the mind.” 

Death came to mind quickly at the sight of vultures, while a sense of defiant loneliness hung with the boxing bag in its gritty yard. Something about these conjured Kevin Carter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning image of The vulture and the little girl for me, blurring the line between documentary and conceptual photography, as if to say: “Look! This is what happened next.”

Saaiqa, Kevin, 2014. Courtesy of Kalashnikovv Gallery.

Saaiqa’s physiological landscapes became more pronounced as I moved to a series of family album photographs with handwritten captions titled Kevin. At first glance, they might as well have been lifted from pages of my own family albums, so familiar are the scenes of birthdays, holidays, and children playing. But these are not just photographs. Painted onto each image is a black ghostly figure, more smudge than anything else. It accompanies the person we presume to be Kevin, like a shadow. It is a representation of her uncle’s life with schizophrenia.

In this gentle insistence on documenting the visible with the less visible, Saaiqa gives us a tool to imagine life with mental illness with a visceral sensitivity.

These photographs contrast to the more abstract works in her Fourth Wall series. Titles such as The Thud, The Tear and how thin the veil reinforce an idea of inner worlds battling it out for survival in the outside world.

“WHAT WILL PEOPLE SAY?!” This is the cry coming from one of Tyra Naidoo’s paintings, hung between Saaiqa’s works. It echoes generations of community gossip that live rent-free in the minds of those who shine a light on all that is taboo.

Tyra Naidoo, Maternal Nightmare, 2022. Courtesy of Kalashnikovv Gallery.

The painting itself is like something out of a classical Indian fable-turned-graphic novel. Titled Maternal Nightmare, it places the erotic and the shamed hand-in-hand. This painting accompanied two larger ones: Familia(l:r) and in case i don’t see you, good afternoon, good evening and goodnight. Collectively, they reflect the intersections of “Desi Durban culture” and womanhood in which Tyra was born and raised.

Each painting is magnetic with Naidoo’s characteristic use of henna and metallic pigment. The scenes they depict raise ordinary moments and everyday pressures to the status of contemporary mythology. They are also deliciously subversive, for it is henna that is traditionally used to adorn an Indian bride before ‘giving her away.’ 

Continuing the theme of colliding the documentary with the dream-like were Alka Dass’s bright blue, embroidered cyanotype drawings.

Unlike Naidoo’s or Saaiqa’s images, where a sense of story is either constructed or implied, here Dass seems to have exploded narrative altogether. Images like ‘acceptance is a quiet room’ and ‘the burning ones’ are ghost-like, layered with superimposed textures, as if to say: “Does this still haunt you?”

This is Dass’s practice of “drawing inspiration from Hindu mythology and ritual alongside reconfigured experiences from her childhood into an imaginative realm.” The effect is prickly, poking at my own sense of home and belonging.

Before Dass’s images could poke too deep, I turned to Songs at Midnight, the final piece of the group show. It is an installation of tin, prayer wood, clove, “labaan” and “hawan samagri” – all traditionally burned to purify the air. The smell of burnt herbs lingering transported me swiftly to every Hindu prayer, wedding and funeral I’ve ever attended. Here, Fever, Returns presents itself in its most primitive form – fire and ash – materials that are foundational to the rituals of which so much of Indianness is composed. 

Tyra Naidoo, Alka Dass and Saaiqa, Songs at Midnight, 2022. Courtesy of Kalashnikovv Gallery.

Taking it all in: what Dass, Naidoo and Saaiqa curated is quite simply, their truths. In the absence of help-text, the show’s dream-like, foggy, memory-like qualities served only to amplify that truth. It offered visual testimony to the work of scholar Azania Imtiaz Khatri-Patel, who cites community mythology and ghost stories as ways of expressing truths that would otherwise be forgotten, repressed, or entirely dismissed. 

Portraying real life from the perspectives of blurred documentary and a dash of pop, Fever, Returns stokes a fire that is both warm and scathing. Such is the messiness of having one’s underrepresented culture affirmed and made visible, even when aspects of that culture may also be a prison one would rather not see.

There, in that cavernous space, the familiar sense of displacement triggered by ‘the art gallery’ made sense, for I’m now at home in the existential limbo I can safely come to expect from the members of Kutti Collective.