Stevenson
13.05 - 30.06.2023
Phate lia Lekana, the latest exhibition by artist and legal scholar Thato Toeba introduces collage works that range from large three-dimensional ‘wall-works’ to smaller installations composed of suspended pictorial assemblages.
Toeba’s work, in keeping with the visual strategies of collage, appears aggregative. She stacks and masses different fragments which generate an independent and non-linear whole. Abstraction and figuration are blended through the incorporation and fragmentation of separate images. This compositional technique produces a phantasmagoric effect.
Thato Toeba, Tsa bo moshemane ha li jooe, 2023. Courtesy of Stevenson.
These critical standards are exploited by Toeba in order to attend to specific ethical and political themes. For example, in the top left corner of Tsa bo moshemane ha li jooe, the naked body of a black woman is inserted directly opposite the line of sight of a white woman. This scene is mediated through the photo of a military tank, the cannon positioned toward the white woman’s ‘gaze’ and her presumed target. The three images are collaged together in a visual sequence that, to borrow from Budd Hopkins, instructs a “unifying system of perspective.”1Budd Hopkins, “Modernism and the Collage Aesthetic,” New England Review (Spring 1997), http://www.buddhopkins.net/1997-new-england-review.pdf The symbolic representations of race and power and their aggregate – the ensuant phantasmagoria – are expressed as a defiguration of the human. For Toeba, one’s line of sight is not impartial, it reflects a power to inhabit a gaze or to be dehumanised by it.
The curator and writer Justin Smith explains that “Black collage is a visual frequency that breaks the line of sight and ushers new frames of reference.”2Justin Smith, “Introduction,” in Teri Henderson (ed.), Black Collagists: The Book (Washington: Kanyer Publishing, 2021), kanyerartcollection.com/book-store/black-collagists-the-book This, it would seem is already a characteristic feature of collage more generally. However, the “black” to which Smith refers, directs us to a specific procedure which invokes an aesthetic tradition preoccupied with challenging putatively universal “lines of sight.” For John O’Neal, “black as a physical fact has little significance but as a cultural, social and political fact… it is important because it gives us ground from which to fight – a way to feel and think about ourselves and our own reality – a way to define.”3John O’Neal, “Afro-American Literary Critics: An introduction,” in Addison Gayle Jr., The Black Aesthetic (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1971).
Thato Toeba, Maberete, 2023. Courtesy of Stevenson.
Toeba’s work can be described as ‘black’ collage precisely because she employs collage in the service of defining the “cultural, social and political fact” of black life. In Maberete, a photograph of a black woman is represented in the action of picking, harvesting and/or reaping. Around her, are what appears to be, at first glance, vegetation. This scene is already ascribed symbolic meaning by virtue of the historical relationship between labour and race. But as we inspect the picture more closely, we are able to locate the intended duplicity of the image. The ‘vegetation’ is in fact a concentrated mass of red berets. The faces of the hat-bearers have been cut out and substituted instead with black silhouettes. In this country’s more recent history, the red beret is synonymous with the EFF and Toeba’s picture, whether signalling this or not, suggests the forms of resistance that are often concealed in the act of forced labour.
In Khomo e selota mpeng, and several other works, Toeba uses the mirror to reflect the viewer into the spaces yet unoccupied by collaged imagery. The viewer is forced to manipulate their body, to mimic the distortion of the image. It is here, in the act of engaging with one’s own spectatorship that the viewer discovers an angle that animates a different order of meaning in the work. To “break the line of sight” as Smith puts it, is challenged by Toeba’s insistence to calibrate the whole picture through one’s own reflection, as if to suggest that the viewer is complicit in the work’s themes. The images ultimately cohere when one becomes an extension of the armature of materials that signify power, history and the making of identity.
Thato Toeba, Khomo e selota mpeng, 2023. Courtesy of Stevenson.
At times, the sheer volume and concentration of images seem gratuitous, camouflaging an absence of defined conceptual parameters. This would support the view held by Charles R Garoian and Yvonne M. Gaudelius, that collage is “devoid of critical choices.”4Charles R. Garoian and Yvonne M. Gaudelius, Spectacle Pedagogy: Art, Politics and Visual Culture, (Albany: Suny Press, 2008), https://sunypress.edu/Books/S/Spectacle-Pedagogy2 But this is not the case. Toeba’s work is challenging precisely because it demands repeated examination of the work’s subtlety. The work disciplines the representational language of each individual image by forcing them to conspire together as a whole. Within Toeba’s kaleidoscope lies an attempt to enunciate complicated ideas with formal clarity and elegance.
The work’s accompanying text translates the title of the exhibition from a Sesotho riddle which says, “when you lie down to sleep, the earth below you is equal to the heaven above you.” Indeed, there is a visual turn of phrase running throughout Toeba’s work, balancing paradox and metaphor. A resistance fighter wielding a rifle and a mother embracing a child occupy the same foreground because, for Toeba, reality is not objective or neutral. It is discursive, an enduring metaphysical problem affected by political and historical contradictions.
Installation view: Thato Toeba, Phate lia Lekan, 2023. Courtesy of Stevenson.
