Standard Bank Gallery
24.02 - 08.04.2023

“PLEASE REMOVE YOUR SHOES” reads a sign at one of three thresholds of Standard Bank Young Artist award winner Buhlebezwe Siwani’s iYeza, a multi-sensory, multi-dimensional exhibition at Johannesburg’s Standard Bank Gallery. The three rooms where the work is shown contain film, sculpture, installation and something, beyond the sensory, that requires a connection with the space itself in order to fully appreciate the works that occupy it. The sign is more instruction than entreaty.

“It’s time we started taking our own traditions seriously,” Siwani said in an interview. “When you enter indumba of any kind, you have to take your shoes off too.” She makes reference to removing one’s shoes before entering a space where sangomas, or African traditional healers, perform the rites of their practice and do patient consultations. 

Installation view: Buhlebezwe Siwani, iYeza, 2023. Courtesy of Standard Bank Gallery.

Siwani began making work about spiritual themes in 2009, during her final year as a Bachelor of Fine Arts student at Wits University. She was undergoing sangoma initiation herself at the time. In 2020, Siwani told Nataal, “When I began my work – and it hasn’t changed – it was under the umbrella of spirituality. What African spirituality really means and how it speaks to colonisation, history, socio-economic conditions, tradition, the black female body. And how all of that takes effect in the present world where we have manifested ourselves as human beings.” Now a qualified healer, Siwani’s work often walks the line between traditional spiritual practice and fine art. In that sense, iYeza fits neatly into her praxis. 

The exhibition’s title, iYeza, “is the Xhosa word for medicine, it is usually in reference to a substance derived from the plants that are used for healing,” Siwani’s artist statement reads. “iYeza in a broader sense is a substance that is meant to ward off dark spiritual energy and invite good spiritual energy.”

Barefoot in one of iYeza’s exhibition spaces, the viewer walks on dark brown soil and patches of grass. Coloured woollen ropes hang from the ceiling and attach to low wooden structures that could be stools or small tables, or both. A single voice sings the same hymn-like chorus repeatedly. 

Installation view: Buhlebezwe Siwani, iYeza, 2023. Courtesy of Standard Bank Gallery.

In another room of the exhibition, titled ilangalibalele, yoga ball-sized spheres of impepho with wooden poles struck through them in all directions hang suspended from the ceiling or propped up on dark brown, red-speckled soil. iLanalibalele translates directly to mean the sun being up in the sky and, according to Siwani, that space serves as “a reminder of how the physical landscape speaks to the spiritual landscape. How our ancestors often used the stars, constellations, colour of the sky to navigate, to tell time, find food, tell the future, speak to their ancestors and for scientific and mathematic reasons.”

In iYeza’s main space, a low, rectangular pool of water with a white base has Siwani’s short film projected onto it from above. Curious viewers touch the water, the daring stand in it. On either side of the water, screens project the same film of six women, each of them performing in a different natural setting: dancing in the forest, desert, cave, plains and natural bodies of water.

“I wanted the women to personify the spirit of the natural settings that they were in,” explains Siwani. The staccato movements in a rocky cave, flowing ones in the water, ethereal ones in the desert, all reflect the nature of the surroundings. But Siwani goes further, wanting to elicit a visceral response from the viewer. “When the spirit touches a rock,” she says, “you can feel it too. When they scrape against a rock, you [winces] too.”

There is much geographic and spiritual ground to cover for the artist. Siwani’s approach is to be sparse, using each room in the Standard Bank Gallery space to explore herbs (especially impepho), prayer and song, the cosmos, water and earth. What is shown, in the end, is a comprehensive, layered and nuanced exploration of the tensions and harmonies intrinsic to contemporary Black spiritual life, with recurring elements of Siwani’s work contributing to a much bigger whole. 

Installation view: Buhlebezwe Siwani, iYeza, 2023. Courtesy of Standard Bank Gallery.

iYeza places African traditional spirituality alongside (African) Christianity as dialectical features of Black spirituality, rather than mutually exclusive opposites. “Our grandmothers would come back from church and burn impepho,” Siwani explained. The audience member unfortunate enough not to have some rudimentary knowledge of African spirituality or African Christianity, however, might fall into the gaps in between works, whereas the nuance unfurls in more knowledgeable people’s psychological and spiritual memory. Arguably, the purpose of iYeza might not be didactic. However, the extensive exhibition texts, three in total, and the use of only a few essential elements to convey the message of each work, as well as where and how they are placed in relation to each other, belie an artist bent on not being misinterpreted.

Central to Siwani’s project is doing away with the stigma of Africa as the “dark continent” and the perceived veil of African peoples’ spiritual practices and rituals as secret. This is not Siwani’s first step, far from it, nor is it her last. There is a shift towards minimalism in her works, and the bodies of work that she shows globally, which use a tight selection of works to touch on a number of themes. This contrasts well with the many media in which Siwani is expert. “They thought ‘she’s making soap works’ and then boom,” Siwani explains “I came with film. I do not want to be confirmed.”

Installation view: Buhlebezwe Siwani, iYeza, 2023. Courtesy of Standard Bank Gallery.