The Bag Factory
30.11 - 09.02.2024
In framing the curatorial approach to Nyakallo Maleke’s solo exhibition, Making Sense of The Same Story, at the Bag Factory in Johannesburg, curator Boitumelo Makousu asked — ‘‘O Mang? O Tswa Kae? O Ya Kae?’’ (Who are you? Where do you come from? Where are you going?).
Maleke’s exhibition provided landmarks of a constantly developing practice, tracked through experimentation with different materials. In her earlier works, she employed kraft and wax paper as surfaces on which to mark, draw and stitch. The repetitive approach to stitching gave the work depth, making it seem sculptural. In her more recent works fabric was combined with thread, charcoal pencil, tea leaves, watercolour, acrylic, soft pastels and vegetable sack cutouts. Through the use of these non-traditional materials, intuitive maps were formed, allowing the artist to present her haptic and process-led research.
Through the exhibition, Maleke contemplated materiality — its delicacy, fragility, vulnerability and material’s potential for repair. She engaged in processes of intuitive drawing and mark-making while making use of thread to devise a new language to uncover self. Though her works varied in texture, composition and scale, their commonality lay in the use of pastel and primary colours.
Nyakallo Maleke, Seeding 2020, Courtesy of the artist.
Maleke convened a workshop titled ‘Tiny Houses and Horizons’, calling on audiences to draw, paint and experiment with the provided materials. Viewers were encouraged to participate in the process of making, using materials the artist provided in the exhibition space. This workshop served as a guide into the artistic process and an inward-looking activity that allowed for a clearer contemplation of the works on display.
Nyakallo Maleke, Drawing Safety Kits & Materials, Courtesy of the artist.
In Seeding, Maleke formed wax paper into a diaphanous veil; threaded with dotted and circular motions on one side, contrasted by vertical stitching on the other. The marks were spread out, allowing for a spatial arrangement that gave way to variations disrupted by a bright red mark that looked like a floating figure. When looking at this work, there is a sense that the ephemeral is being intuitively documented and mapped out. It’s hard to engage the fragility in the work without thinking about the year it was produced, in 2020 during the global pandemic. What does it mean to be planting seeds at the end of the world? What does it mean to be engaging in map-making when the world is slowed into a state of stillness? Is the liminal space habitable?
The work Seeding felt like a collection of materials from a world seen and unseen, a process of tracking one’s location within the physical and the otherworldly. In making a connection with Maleke’s love for cycling and the allusions to maps in the body of work, I think of the eye as a kind of visual collector and archivist. Having spent a few years cycling in Johannesburg, like Maleke, I always drew strange connections in overlapping realities in different parts of the city and how they seemed to hold a kind of dystopian conversation.
In Tracking Il creased kraft paper took a horizontal, rectangular form — with solid black, white and grey lines threaded in a manner that mimics piano keys on a key bed. In this work, Maleke’s technique allows for the materials to take on new forms and engage in processes of durability and malleability. She shares that the paper creased as she was travelling with it and instead of discarding it, she identified this as a kind of self-imposed marking-making. I believe this approach ushers in a sense of synesthesia; conjuring sounds associated with initiations and rights of passage. When wielding this sonic lens to contemplate the tension arising from threading a needle through this delicate paper, I accessed sounds of thumping, trickling and tearing; radiating echoes of dying and rebirth rising from processes of renewal and repair.
The titles of the works alluded to an unpacking of a deeply personal journey. Using fabric as a surface, in Find Your Way, she created circuit-like lines intersecting with pencil markings and emptied tea bags pasted onto the base. The poured-out tea leaves were tied into tiny plastic bags and attached to the top of the tiled tea bags they used to occupy. All that Maleke has touched on this wide landscape took a central stance — a slow look is provoked, beckoning a fragmented gaze, sending the eye into a process of decoding each mark, stitch, compounded layer and circuiting line.
Making Sense of The Same Story is not about sense-making. Instead, it is an invitation to explore materials’ abundance as a source of making. Materials oscillate between resistance and surrender, negotiating where they want to be placed and how they want to be handled.
