blank projects
02.02 - 25.03.2023
In a 2015 conversation with art critic Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artist Kemang Wa Lehulere talks about “recording the erasure”1Kemang Wa Lehulere quoted in Khwezi Hule and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year Catalogue (Cape Town: Stevenson, 2015). of his own chalk drawings that are fated to fade (away). This decision – to hurriedly document – is prompted by full knowledge that the drawings will soon disappear due to the chalk’s radically short lifespan. The phrase (or rather, mode) – recording the erasure – functions, in this context, as an instrument for holding on to something precious and precarious, while allowing the artist to bear witness to a certain kind of violence whose damage is irreparable and cannot be un-done. It is my attempt here to take (or dislodge) this phrase from its context, to allow us a wayward and decidedly selective reading of his present show at blank, Bring Back Lost Love.
One could say that Wa Lehulere’s single vocation is to record this violence and the paradigmatic structure that makes this violence (of erasure) possible. In Bring Back Lost Love, Wa Lehulere embarks on a recording which can simultaneously (in a non-contradictory mode) be thought of as an archeological digging and schematic mapping of ideas and disparate histories. Through a variety of materials, the artist puts together a dense body of work composed of (1) ink drawings produced in a call-and-response collaboration with his aunt, Sophia Lehulere, (2) a three-set installation titled Black Forest (2021), populated by objects such as casts of white hands, black porcelain dogs, wood and concrete objects, and sinister sets of well-placed ‘Molotov’ cocktails, (3) Reddening of the Greens 2 (ii) (2021), a wall work made of eight suitcases extended by wooden crutches that gives them the effect of being in motion, (4) a handwritten letter by the artist appealing to the Nobel Peace Prize committee on behalf of late author Sol T. Plaatje, as well as (5) Notes 1-13 (2017-2021) and Conference of the birds (i) (2017-2021), the former comprised of chalk drawings on chalkboards protruding from a black wall, and the latter, which seems to be in direct dialogue with the former, a set of sixteen “bird-boxes” on the floor punctuated by music stands, porcelain dogs, and rolled letters.
Kemang Wa Lehulere, Black Forest, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and blank projects.
There is a productive tension in the works on show, but more strikingly in Black Forest (2021), where we learn, from the artist’s words, of his interest, on the one hand, in “(il)legibility” (the bracketed prefix marking a foreclosure) and, on the other hand, a “desire for our stories to be told and heard.”2Kemang Wa Lehulere quoted in blank projects’ exhibition text. Emphasis mine. The tension here is, of course, between a (Black) desire not to be read or be readable, to be in the excess of both enunciation and comprehension, while desiring an audience to bear witness to your witnessing,3Of course, Paul Celan declared, “No one / bears witness for the / witness.” to ask that my illegibility be understood. I do think this tension is productive rather than a conceptual cul-de-sac, because it marks an unbridgeable gap between demand and desire. (The title operates under the same logic: to demand that I/or some Other brings back this lost object that I/is love, is precisely the problem borne of a demand for something I know I’m structurally barred from ever attaining [again?]).
Even though the use of the word ‘salvaged’ in the exhibition text, in relation to the school desks (that are at the heart of Wa Lehulere’s practice) is quite suspicious,4If we think of salvage/d as a kind of rescue from loss or dereliction, then as artists and ‘cultural producers’ we must be careful of how we frame our use/appropriation of materials so that we don’t descend into a kind of saviour complex. I’m aware that I’m being extremely harsh here but oftentimes we pay little attention to language and power (our relative power). his attention to materiality (and metaphor) opens a generative space for a contestation of hegemonic meaning/s. In the hands of Wa Lehulere, metaphor, as a domain of meaning-making (and an imposition, a transfer and mapping of one sign on another unrelated sign), allows him to put to scrutiny the operative dynamics of the prevailing anti-Black order by way of carving an opening for radical questioning and transgressive knowledge (re)production. The metaphorical structure of the work covers a lot of ground as far as the domain of politics is concerned, but remains unclear if it adequately clarifies5Because I am guided, partly, by Charles Gaines’ troubles with and troubling of the metaphor/metonymy structural relation, I am wondering then if this is a structural limit of metaphor that is always bound to produce this mystification rather than a shortcoming on Wa Lehulere’s part. See Charles Gaines, “Reconsidering Metaphor/Metonymy: Art and the Suppression of Thought” in Art Lies (2009), Accessed here. the relation between, say protest on the one hand, and spirituality on the other.6 This dual tension is provided by the artist in the exhibition text. The former allows the artist to move to multiple positions at once, and this is how we could account for the density of his work and, to be more precise, this show. The latter, which is my point, is equally crucial: how does one rely on metaphor/icity without risking further mystification of the political stakes of the work?
Perhaps, lastly, we could think of his commitment to a repetitive layering and effacing, as a mode and metaphor of self-erasure (which is an extension of the desire to be illegible but heard) that we can think of as a finding and killing of the self (in the Barakian sense), as an “act of writing toward disappearance, rather than the act of writing toward preservation,”, to borrow and slightly de-contextualise Peggy Phelan’s intervention in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance.7Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 148. And herein lies the radical impulse and critical purchase of his practice.
Kemang Wa Lehulere, Reddening of the Greens 2 (ii), 2021. Courtesy of the artist and blank projects.
