blank projects
31.08 - 14.10.2023
In the brief exhibition text that accompanies Sabela Uyabizwa at blank projects, a solo by photographer Phumzile Khanyile, we encounter an apparent interest in the chasm between “what can be seen” and “what can be experienced,”1Phumzile Khanyile, ‘Sabela Uyabizwa’ (Cape Town: blank projects, 2023). Available here. that is, the gap between the domain of visuality – or simply what Peter Weibel terms “retinal representation”2Peter Weibel, ‘Re-presentation of the Repressed: The political revolution of the neo-avant-garde,’ Radical Philosophy 137 (2006): 21. Available here. – and the whole structure of sensible experience. This untenable binary opens, for the artist, “[a] whole new world” unavailable to or “not immediately present to perception.”3Paul Crowther, What Drawing and Painting Really Mean: The Phenomenology of Image and Gesture, (New York: Routledge, 2017), 16. This space, where the artist sources the signs and symbols that populate her images, is the dreamworld that functions as a kind of spiritual inheritance, what the photographer calls “clues to a journey that began long before me and will continue long after me.”
Sabela Uyabizwa is composed of 14 photographs and a single channel video that is under 4-minutes. These monochromatic, inverted and unframed images range from the immediately recognisable objects (such as a TV, a plant, a stand, a curtain, a window leaves, trees, walls and a gate shot from inside the premises) to the radically abstracted figures that appear as drawings of children and animals.
I am drawn to the work’s painterly qualities (that seem digitally manipulated in their exaggerated pixelation) and impressive scale of blown up black compositions. I find curious the pictorial unintelligibility – or what Cecilio Cooper recently called the “edge of intelligibility”4Cecilio M. Cooper, ‘Plumbing the abyssal: On (Vanta)Blackness and Descent,’ Alienoscene, 26 November 2022. Available here. – achieved through a decision to render the images in dark blackness. This is a curious chromatic choice, particularly the photographs’ dark, negative or dead spaces that signify, in a sense, a certain “pure photographic apparition,” to borrow from Francois Laruelle.5Francois Laruelle, The Concept of Non-Photography, trans. Robin Mackay (New York: Sequence Press, 2011). I’m interested in interrogating how the photographer accidentally stumbles on a deeper crisis that begs the question: what really links blackness (within our present onto-epistemological order’s aesthetic regime) as both uchroma6Grateful to the Cooper texted cited above for this concept of the “uchromatic,” credited to Francois Laruelle by way of Tavia Nyong’o. Cooper states that “Tavia Nyong’o disputes common-sense understandings of blackness as ‘the absence or opposite of color.’ Achromatic describes a lack of hue or saturation along with colorless reflections of light or imperviousness to stains. Nyong’o instead finds blackness to be ‘the possibility of any color whatsoever,’ terming it uchromatic” (emphasis in original). and a racialised position, with unintelligibility? (One could add, unintelligibility at the level of the image.) How does this unintelligibility – or, even better, ontological incommunicability – fare against and/or help clarify what aesthetic philosopher David Lloyd calls “the racial structures of aesthetic theory?”7David Lloyd, Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 4.
Phumzile Khanyile, Bayeza, 2021-2022. Courtesy of blank projects.
We encounter, in these works, figures and objects that float against a vast space of darkness that helps define, if not illuminate, their outlines. Khanyile mobilises the dark black hue to map a formless void through a kind of “abyssal abstraction”8Lloyd, Under Representation, 68. that structures the world of her figures/objects, as well as that world’s relation to the artist. Khanyile is trying to understand herself better (as the works’ accompanying rhetorical gestures seem to suggest). She is searching for self-understanding in the dark black hue.
What does it mean, then, to conceive of the (racialised) self9What in the exhibition text is called “the artist’s own interiority.” in this darkness/blackness? It appears that darkness/blackness is affirmed by the artist as a kind of negativity and stands in an interesting relation to the supposed quest for a sovereign subjecthood. However, what is never attended to in this voguish turn towards the self (as it finds expression, more so, in Black South African contemporary works, particularly those of an equally voguish spiritualist orientation) is a theory of selfhood or self-making, a rigorous reading of subject formation (at least at the level of the imaginary, that is, at the level of what I think I am, and/in relation to what I think the world thinks I am), which remains theoretically underdeveloped in South Africa, especially in its structural relation to the image and the aesthetic writ large.
Most generative in this regard is the artist’s abstraction of the form of the photograph. We are faced with the limits of the photographic mode: both the technological apparatus of the camera and the paradigm of representation, particularly in its encounter with the Black subject’s interiority/[life/dream]worlds. The photograph, as “an a priori quasi-field of fiction,”10Laruelle, The Concept of Non-Photography, 26. as Laruelle puts it, becomes the ideal place for Khanyile to stage these abstractions and leaps, both their radical potential and conceptual shortcomings; we are asked to reflect on the link between dream(ing) and images or image-making, the psychic, ethical, emotional, political, and spiritual demands and dimensions of the photograph. What do pictures want (of us), anyways? And how do we understand ourselves in relation to them?
Installation view: Phumzile Khanyile, Sabela Uyabizwa, 2023. Courtesy of blank projects.
