National Arts Festival
22.06 - 02.07.2023
The Eastern Cape has always been a door ajar.
I have been turning this line from Koleka Putuma’s Theatre of Beauty: Imvuselelo over in mind ever since I got back from Arts Fest. It is an unfastened thought, you can make of it what you will, but it managed to explain something of my time in Makhanda. It was a very mysterious experience, one that never felt completely closed off to the chance of something impossible happening. Or, at the very least, being there seemed to encourage a porous attitude. I approached this year’s line-up of art exhibitions accordingly.
Putuma’s show, the product of her Young Artist Award for poetry, distills the delirious experience of an arts festival down to a lime green tincture. It was trippy, but precise; sharp as a tack. Increasingly, nowadays, I hear artists describe their experience of pure, uncut inspiration as “tripping,” which makes sense to me. Theatre of Beauty not only triangulates inspiration and psychedelics, but also holds that altered states can facilitate a certain clarity. The exhibition sustains a lively tension between intoxication and perspicuousness. Things are clearly not what they seem, but Putuma is serious about finding a better, more accurate way of looking at them.
Koleka Putuma, from Theatre of Beauty: Imvuselelo, 2023. Courtesy of NAF.
In service of this vision, lighting design does a lot of the heavy lifting. Putuma’s background in the theatre shone through. Her mise-en-scène frequently conjures up a luminescent atmosphere of doom, only to be offset by her forthright lyricism around the next corner. “Terror, too, is a guide.” The poems, most of them brief, are presented on strips of raw canvas, alongside a handful of abrasive video works. At one point, a whistle, suspended in a clear perspex cube, stopped me in my tracks. It cast a delicate diagonal shadow and I did not know what to make of it. It was perfect, I thought.
Odous and DormantYouth, ReVisiting OtherWhere, 2023. Courtesy of NAF.
Another exhibition that put bisexual lighting to good use was ReVisiting OtherWhere by Odous and DormantYouth. Despite its unsightly title, the show had a fun idea: to turn a nightclub into a haunted house. The eerie tape loops that filled the space rang true. Who hasn’t felt spooked in the club? I am intrigued by the work of DormantYouth, aka Thelma Ndebele, whose practice combines electronic music and architecture. The artist creates “prototypical installations” to model the environments in which musical subcultures can form.
Most of the exhibitions were shown at the Monument Building up a deceptively steep hill. Thankfully, there was a small gallery halfway called The Raw Spot, where I was able to catch my breath. They were showing a handsome selection of linocuts by Nompumelelo Edith Bukani called My Name Will Be Mine One Day. Bukani’s work makes a study of patterns in the world and each piece has its own rhythm. My pick of the bunch was Cheating Husband, a soft spoken domestic scene twinging with betrayal.
Further up the hill, a photographic exhibition titled Lore of the Land also dealt with domesticity, but this time in terms of legal culture. The project, led by Saskia Vermeylen, Luke Kaplan and Kileni Fernando, purports to be “the first of its kind to visualise the legal meaning of ancestral land right claims through photography.” In other words, Lore of the Land is trying out new ways of representing the law, in the context of the Ju/’hoan and !Xun communities in particular. The exhibition has three parts, the first of which is called the Object Series, wherein photographer Luke Kaplan carefully renders an assortment of domestic implements. His pointed still lives aim to show that “law is produced and reproduced in the everyday.”
The Birth Site and Menarche Portrait section comprises a series of diptychs showing women at “the physical site of their rites of passage (menarche and birth).” More specifically, a black and white picture of the empty site is paired with a colour photograph of the women in situ. This particular gesture, of adding/subtracting the subject and colour from the landscape, is an elegant way of visualising an intimate relationship to land. Lastly, the N!om (Black & White) Series portrays the process of !aia, where healers make contact with spirits and ancestors through performance. Kaplan’s high contrast, long exposure shots of healers literally tripping around a blown out bonfire are indelible and stake their claim with purpose.
Lady Skollie, Rub Us Out (triptych), 2023. Courtesy of NAF.
I then descended into the catacombs of the Monument Building to find this year’s main event: Lady Skollie’s Young Artist Award show titled Groot Gat. The artist begins her statement as follows: “The erasure of Bushman paintings in Africa has left behind a big void, a hole with no end, a gaping omission that lies unfilled.” The work squares up to a historical gat that is also the generative principle of Lady Skollie’s practice. The paintings that have materialised are consistently rich and full. The Rub Us Out triptych, which served as the thumbnail for the exhibition, is even more striking at scale. After seeing her rock painting animations projected onto the walls of a cave, I cannot stop thinking about what a Lady Skollie animated film would be like. Make it happen, Standard Bank!
There were some odds and ends showing in adjacent rooms, though they were mostly quite forgettable. Nyaniso Lindi had some work up in a very unflattering space around the corner, but it failed to impress upon me. The exhibition commemorating Madosini at the Sun Gallery was equally lacklustre. I got to listen to a few of her songs on a pair of headphones, which was nice, but I have Spotify for that. More exciting was Del ‘Ukufa (Dare to Die) by Msaki, who put together an exhibition as part of her Young Artist Award for music. I am always in favour of pop stars trying their hand at different media and it was more or less successful in this case. The singer’s sense for installation is perhaps less developed, but she is not a bad painter.
Msaki, Del ‘Ukufa (Dare to Die), 2023. Courtesy of NAF.
After securing a last minute comp, I ran down the hill to watch Gregory Maqoma dance for the last time ever. I walked out in a daze and stumbled into the Rhodes Department of Fine Art student exhibition. Out with the old, in with the new, I guess. Wil-Merie Greyling, who trafficked 1,8 tonnes of salt from Swakopmund to Makhanda for her Master’s project, thinks through her material in interesting ways, but one gets the sense that she was not sure what to do with the material once it arrived. The thick slabs of salt do speak for themselves though, I’ll give her that. Julia Arbuckle did a big family archive piece, but I would be keen to see her fine and attentive sensibility applied to different subject matter. In general, the kids seem to be alright, and none of them are interested in new media.
The last exhibition I saw was a sample of works from the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality art collection at the Albany Museum. It was the morning after my last night at the festival and a few hours before my flight, so everything appeared more surreal than the artists probably intended. They had an amazing Walter Battiss called Desert Plants, which looked like something out of Spongebob Squarepants. It stood alongside a similar landscape with softer edges by Gladys Mgudlandlu in one corner. A big, gluey Siopis dominated the space and seemed to set the tone. The museum felt cold and empty, and the artworks withdrawn.
I paused, for a moment, in front of the 19th century paintings and settled on The slaying of Hintsa by Frederick Timpson l’Ons. The damp, dark green gorge he reproduces is an irresistible setting, but l’Ons take on the already contested death of Hintsa kaKhawuta seems suspect. He neglects to implicate any settlers in the scene, not even George Southey, the man who reportedly shot Hintsa at close range. The work does not contain itself. There is an absence within the frame that refers to what might be outside of it. Things are clearly not what they seem.
Putuma’s words rang through my mind again, as I stepped back out into that dusty old frontier town. A cloud of mist had settled into its cupped palm and I felt the sudden need to get out of there. What a strange and inspired valley, I thought. The perfect place for an arts festival.
Installation view: In the Eye of the Beholder, 2023. Courtesy of Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum.
