Goodman Gallery
27.08 - 10.11.2022

Kala Pani.

It means “dark waters”. It is the phrase that lives rent-free in my mind when confronted with the facts (or echoes) of indenture and Coolietude – facts I share with the descendants of millions of Indian labourers scattered across Empire’s sugar/tea/coffee/cocoa/spice/textile/steel/coal/gold/diamond/rubber trails.

In orthodox Hindu tradition, to cross the ocean – the kala pani – would be to lose the “moorings of caste,” as scholar and writer Gaiutra Bahadur explains: 

For the indentured, return was a promise made in writing, part of their contract; but only a quarter ever journeyed back to India. Many who did found themselves rejected by their families and neighbours in their native villages… The very act of crossing the seas had turned them into polluted and polluting beings… For the overwhelming majority of ‘coolies’, there would be no return.

Standing in front of Ravelle Pillay’s Crossing – an arresting oil painting that depicts a boatful of ghosty people with brown skin and white clothes suspended in storm – I sense the familiar echo of the kala pani. Here it is, part warning, part taunt, part exaltation – and it bleeds from the corners of the canvas in dark red, as if birthing this boatful of “polluted beings” (in the eyes of caste) or unwitting settlers (in the eyes of colony).

Ravelle Pillay, Water memory, 2022. Courtesy of Goodman Gallery.

I’m at the opening of Pillay’s solo show, Tide and Seed, at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg. It is her first show with the gallery, marking her first year of plunging herself full-time into oil-based explorations of self, family, history and nature’s witness to it all.

Cue Water memory, an aptly named image of what looks like a group of school-children – uniformed in dark tunics and Cobra-polished shoes – all lined up at a registration table. The faces of some of the children cut through the canvas, but it is not to “say ‘Cheese!’” Dark blue, foliage-like shade above them, reddish earth below – the painting conjures associations of farm schools “for the Indians” in the structure of indentured life in Natal. 

Though she draws from her grandmother’s archive of family photographs, I get the sense that Pillay is not just recreating snapshots of her family history in a different medium. She seems to be re-immersing the images, figuratively speaking, in ‘kala pani’ all over again – as if to see what else surrounds the moments that photographs can, and do, obscure.

In conversation with Pillay, she attests to the relationship between herself, her subjects and her canvas. “The entire process stemmed from an early impulse for a bit more self-knowledge…and it developed into a desire to know more about my family, which became a desire to think about what life-making looks like in a wider sense,” she explains.

That impulse would lead her to imagine the possible permutations of her existence around the world – the way in which the indentured “could have ended up anywhere – from Guyana to Fiji” – and how, of the many human witnesses to this history, there is one enduring witness that the indentured across the Caribbean, Africa and beyond share: the natural world.Spirit pine, mangrove trees, banana leaves, the ocean itself, and more – these populate Pillay’s paintings as what she calls “a witnessing environment.”Witness to what, exactly? Looking at the paintings Night Garden and Garden, with their indistinct figures, almost greyed out against vivid leaves, the answer to that seems to lie with the garden – not with the people. 

But Pillay hints at it: “I started to think about how lives were made ‘in spite of’ and ‘in defiance’… Memory is just just an echo. It keeps going. You know, undeniable things have happened in places undeniably. And I like the idea of the environment as a holder for those things.”

The painting Loved Ones drives this idea home for me: our oceans, shorelines and landscapes are also a part of who we are. 

Ravelle Pillay, Loved onesy, 2022. Courtesy of Goodman Gallery.

Still adrift on the dark waters of Pillay’s memory-scape, I work my way back to the entrance of the Goodman Gallery, to greet the work of Nicholas Hlobo. In his newest solo exhibition, Yongamela Ubumnyama – also a first with the gallery – Hlobo sets fire to a similar darkness. Working with his signature materials of ribbons, leathers, threads and acrylics on stark white canvas, Hlobo has been considering what life-making looks like now in a pandemic-altered world.

“The demise of the human being is forgetfulness.” 

That’s Hlobo, punctuating our conversation about the many ways humans throughout history have had to make and remake their lives. Unlike Pillay’s perspective on the role of collective trajectories on identity, Hlobo is concerned with going inward, with ‘interrogating darkness’ as the title of his show suggests.

In a series of high-contrast mixed media works, Hlobo almost clinically stitches together ribbon, lace and leather before dragging bold acrylic paints intuitively over each figure. The effect is mesmerising, and I am roped into a web of animism with each work. 

Nicholas Hlobo, Intonela, 2022. Courtesy of Goodman Gallery.

Pieces like Intonela (‘Tune in’), Khulukazi” (‘A lady’), and Intabamlilo (‘Volcano’) – with their tentacle-like, amoeba-like shapes – give visual testimony to Hlobo’s reflections on the questions the pandemic pried open for each of us, to varying degrees.

“The question is, how do we get to survive?” he asks. “How do we withstand all the challenges to come? How do we get to move across the turbulences?” 

Hlobo refers to the paths available to us  to build our lives and our ideas of self after the pandemic. He argues that “the madness of COVID-19” has only forced new, unforeseeable trajectories on us – much like the ‘kala pani’ of Ravelle Pillay’s paintings did for generations to come. This idea –  self-discovery, self-invention – seems sewn into Hlobo’s practice, the practice of his work, but also of living. 

“To be human, I believe, is…to be…constantly morphing and hoping to change,” he reflects.

Nicholas Hlobo, Unqulo (diptych), 2022. Courtesy of Goodman Gallery.

Taken together, Nicholas Hlobo’s Yongamela Ubumnyama and Ravelle Pillay’s Tide and Seed appear absorbed in intergenerational conversation with one another. Both explore the makings of the self – through private introspection and collective memory respectively. Both harness a tension between ideas of human and nature, and both circle questions of meaning in a time where the only constant has been not only change, but chaos.

Together, they evoke the words of Trinidadian poet Lauren K. Alleyne:

Meaning is the closest we get to salvation,
which is to say the word changes nothing
—it does not unmake the rivers, cannot
erase them from the landscape of us—spells
have their limits. Which is to say return
means too-late-to-be-saved in any language.
The longing is to be pure; what you get is to be
changed. 

As Hlobo might quip, “To what end – don’t ask me.”

Nicholas Hlobo, Waxhotyiswa engekakhawulwa, 2017. Courtesy of Goodman Gallery.