Film and television have always been egregious in their depictions of love between Black people, but particularly regarding the representations of the romantic endeavours and interests of Black women. In mainstream films, Black women have appeared as varying stereotypes across genres. As Edward Mapp observes, “Her film image has been defined by others rather than herself… a tragic history of stereotyping… a steady procession of mammies, maids, miscegenists, matriarchs, madams and assorted ‘make-it-for-money’ types.”1Edward Mapp, 1973. “BLACK WOMEN in FILMS.” The Black Scholar 4 (6/7): 42–https://www.jstor.org/stable/41163796. In the tradition of the romantic film, Black women are less likely to appear as romantic interests; how they love and are loved is largely absent from the popular cultural imagery. Where they are present, such as in the Black romantic film like The Best Man (1999), Love and Basketball (2000), Deliver Us From Eva (2003) – similarly misogynist and classist stereotypes are reinforced. These films can be ringing endorsements of white patriarchal frameworks of partnership formation, both on screen and off screen.
This is the context in which Motlhoki Nono is working. The exhibition text states that her “practice departs from observing the racialised gap that excludes the experiences of [B]lack people, as well as the gendered one excluding [B]lack women as the subjects of love in romantic productions.” She attempts to map “the lines of intimacy and violence within love,” while also hoping to “contribute towards a [B]lack romantic archive” that centres Black women’s experiences. Nono’s endeavour into this dominion of love is instigated with The Weight of a Kiss.
Motlhoki Nono, Nono V, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
We are familiar with the perfectly moisturised images of lips in a prelude to a kiss as continuously choreographed for decades on film and television. The kiss in film is glamourous, an elegantly constructed image for an experience that is generally, in real life, quite messy, sloppy, awkward, and less than perfect. The kiss in film is a product of escalation, carefully built up with heightened tension until it reaches its resolutory scene, with perfect lighting and suitable soundtrack. This kiss, framed and sanitised, has affected the way in which we expect romantic encounters to be experienced in real life. Nono does away with the aesthetic dignity offered on most screen depictions of a kiss, or the prelude to one. Her images are less refined. The mouth is smashed, not submissive, but assertive, active, engaged. It is what you would see if your eyes were open, a tongue mushed up against another, the blurred hint of a nose, a patch of darkness, an obscured peripheral awareness. This kiss is unmoored; there is not a sense of place or time, as if the mouth exists outside the reality of the moment. A gaping maw, tongue out, possibly dripping, pressing down, seeking to be tethered to another. The mouth is a repeated motif in The Weight of a Kiss, evocative of a yearning, a need that can be both monstrous and hungry, but also raw and innocent. Visually, Nono’s work is engrossing, funny, straightforward and a bit disgusting. You cannot help being perplexed but also terribly amused.
The images of The Weight of a Kiss are accompanied by text between and alongside on the walls. These words, at first, read like the easy prose of romantic declarations of desire, carnal and overt, like “yours slowly tracing the contours of my mouth,” and “supple bodies, bonelessly contorting themselves against each other.” The longer ones are reminiscent of extracts from romantic stanzas or more aptly scriptural verses: “The holy ones will know how to clasp their lover’s mouth in prayer and speak to them in tongues.” Then there are those that could read either way, as secularly romantic or holy allegory, to “hollow me with inverted tongue” or “to gauge a hole in your mouth and place tenderness on your tongue with my own.” These sentences evoke a certain devoutness to ideal love and its rituals. They highlight and point to what Charles Lindholm calls the “fiction of romance,”2Charles Lindholm, 2006. “Romantic Love and Anthropology.” Etnofoor 19 (1): 5–21. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25758107. how it is “acutely conscious of itself as code or cliché.” Lindholm likens this reverence to “a kind secular salvation.”3Ibid. There is evidence of this iconography of spiritual fulfilment to be found in ideal love in images like Glossolalia.
Motlhoki Nono, The Holy Ones, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
Glossolalia is inserted in the recessed windows of the exhibition space. Combined with the rosy, pink soft ambient light, the silhouette of the trees encircling the lit mouth, it fashions reverence. This reverence is that of the stained-glass iconography historically exclusive to churches, cathedrals and religious buildings. It is particularly effective labelling, given that glossolalia is the act of speaking in tongues, occurring during intensified experiences of faith. There is a mirroring to faith and its institutions and love in its ideal, especially as it is presented in the romantic film. Love has become perfect, simple to digest, its signifiers easy to follow and perform.
Rounding off the exhibition is a ten-minute thirty-six second video set to the Days of Our Lives opening theme. Familiar to South African television screens, Days of Our Lives was a long running American soap opera that ended in 2022. In its entire tenure, it had two notable Black women characters: Celeste Perrault, a ‘magical negress’ type who showed up to portent danger and save the citizens of Salem with her psychic powers, as well as her mixed race daughter, Lexie DiMera/Carver, one of the town doctors who, throughout the show, must fight the seduction of the money and power available to her through her villainous white father, who just happens to be the show’s major villain. The soundtrack is a bit of an odd choice; it is jarring. Forty-four seconds into the video, there is a confetti-filled transition into a mushed-up nose and wide mouth with its tongue out. The tongue is the focus, enlarged to the point of the grotesque. On this tongue, we see arms and hands protruding from darkness to layer a surface in flour. I find this to be hilariously nasty, the beating and squeezing sounds as the dough is shaped into a perfectly round ball. Then the soundtrack gets wobbly, more ominous, perhaps reality interfering in this perfect picture of love. This intimate cavernous space is a layered surface in which to knead, work and make this love.
At seven minutes and ten seconds, the red kneaded dough gets cut out into heart shapes that float on to the following scene, a black and white close-up of lovers kissing, and the video ends. I am less intrigued by this ending; it mimics the romantic scenes of contemporary films, reducing the metaphoric power of the kiss to that of the carnal. It does not have the frivolity, the butterfly-inducing rush of lovers at play, something that is infrequent to see onscreen for Black coupling and, specifically, Black women. It would have been interesting to evoke the magic of something like Something Good – Negro Kiss, an 1898 thirty second silent film of an African American couple kissing, hugging, holding hands and laughing. Once considered lost media, it was rediscovered in the 2010s by Dr. Allyson Nadia Field.4Tambay Obenson, 2021. “‘Something Good — Negro Kiss’: Solving Its Historical Mystery and How to Account for ‘Lost’ Black Films.” IndieWire. November 26, 2021. https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/something-good-negro-kiss-lost-black-films-1234654298/.
Motlhoki Nono, Tiiso II, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
Apart from the last few moments of the video, Nono’s image choices negate the constant order of vision in which Black people and Black women are obliged to appear. Her images are neither modest nor overtly sensual, neither of which are empowering or new. The difference here is the lack of glamourised or hypersexualised expression, which might easily sit as another commodified image of Black people doing Black things. The entire body of work allows for a level of intimacy that is not in service of others, but considers a kind of love for Black people and Black women that is a safe place to land without expectation or reservations.
On the other hand, there is also room to consider the uglier side of romantic love. There is a monstrousness to the mouth. It could be a keening, desperate scream mushed and hushed behind glass, as much as it could be a call, a yearning, a seeking or leaning into an unsophisticated gesture of love, a kiss. I see the monstrousness of the mouth as emblematic of romantic love, which is not always a safe thing. Romantic love is coupling with another person; that other person can be a liability, a risk. They are uniquely positioned to hurt you. The ideal can suddenly become nightmare.
In all, Nono’s work is unexpected. There is no aspiration for the perfect photograph. Her images are play, pure indulgence, an earnest exploration of an area of life we are obsessively anxious about. An ordinary concern from which Black women are often left out in the creeping normality of the collective imagination.
Motlhoki Nono, Nono III, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
Tatenda Magaisa is the 2023 David Koloane Award Recipient, Bag Factory Artists’ Studios. This edition, kindly funded by the National Arts Council, supports Johannesburg-based aspiring critical arts writers (aged 21-35) working in the fields of exhibition curating, journalism and creative writing. This review forms part of the mentorship programme.
Motlhoki Nono will be exhibiting some images from the Weight of a Kiss series in I miss myself the most, opening at Stevenson Johannesburg on 2 December.
