Venice Biennale 2024
20.04 - 24.11.2024

Land acknowledgement: I write this review in Johannesburg / eGoli, on African ancestral land. As an expatriate, holding a passport of a European nation who colonised a number of African countries, I acknowledge the expropriation of African Indigenous territories, dispossession of cultural heritage and Western disciplining of African Indigenous knowledges. I recognise the consequences of genocide, slavery, systems of settler colonial whiteness, racial injustice, ecocide, land occupation, displacement, looting of cultural artefacts, epistemicide, academic extractivism and appropriation of African Indigenous cultures by settler institutions, among other issues. I offer respect, reciprocity, and responsibility with regard to African Indigenous peoples, ancestors, spirits, other-than-human beings, the land, water and sky. I am committed to indigenisation, decolonisation and self-determination, especially with regard to the arts and arts scholarship in this region. To heal from centuries of harm, I call for integrity, ethics and solidarity – grounded in meaningful, intergenerational relationships between African Indigenous and non-indigenous artists, cultural workers and researchers.

Installation view of Dinokana (2024) at “Quiet Ground,” the South African Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia. Courtesy and © MADEYOULOOK, photograph by Bubblegum Club.

The air feels hot and humid on this midsummer day at the Arsenale venue of the 60th Venice Biennale 2024. The escalator takes me up to the South African Pavilion¹By comparison, other African pavilions at the 60th Venice Biennale also present solo shows, such as Benin, Nigeria and Zimbabwe, while Ethiopia, Morocco and Senegal focus on group displays., a solo representation of MADEYOULOOK (the interdisciplinary artist collaboration of Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho). I slip behind heavy black curtains that form the fourth wall of the darkened room, inhaling a fragrant, woodsy smell. Drawn to a large pile of dried plants, I am tempted to grab one stalk or another. The dry texture invites tactility, and I am trying to sniff the complexity of the scent. In front of the dark brick wall to the right, plant stalks hang piece by piece from the high ceiling, forming a rounded shape on reaching the wooden flooring. These spotlighted copper wires sparkle among this dimmed pavilion, contrasting zones of illumination and shadow in the exhibition display. My imagination wonders about confounding the somewhat zoomorphic plant stalks with cicadas, when chirps emerge and recede, listening to the sound piece Dinokana (2024). In the 8-channel sound composition, noises and women’s voices are swelling on and off, suggesting a narrative of partly silence and partly sound, with heat shimmering, wind blowing, frogs croaking, birds chirping, distant thunder groaning, a crowd cheering. The rain is welcomed with clapping. In retrospect, my memories have mostly held on to women’s singing about the rain. With the air circulation making the copper strings subtly float at the pavilion, the viewer-turned-listener almost imagines the twinkling of the copper as raindrops. The stalks of the plant appear to epitomize African Indigenous life and renewal. After a drought period, such as in the North West, heavy clouds bring precipitation and the Galalatshwene²The Galalatshwene plant grows in Dinokana in the North West province and Bokoni in Mpumalanga. It is mostly endemic in geographic areas between Limpopo and Zimbabwe. plant to life. Galalatshwene is the Setswana name for Mythrothamus flabellifolius or the resurrection plant, meaning uvukakwabafile in isiZulu, and umazifisi in isiNdebele³MADEYOULOOK, email message to author, July 12, 2024.. Visitors pause on the wooden installation, touching the softly shaped edges. These context-specific forms remind me of rounded hill contours in South Africa. African, or Africa-based visitors of the pavilion might feel at home in this immersive display. In MADEYOULOOK’s installation, African Indigeneity⁴In this review, I draw from generalised Indigenous, and African Indigenous discourses, yet not from methodologies that are specific regarding nation, ethnicity, or tribe. See their emphasis on “Africa-centred knowledge systems” in Gloria Emeagwali, and George J. Sefa Dei, “Introduction,” in African Indigenous Knowledge and the Disciplines, ed. Gloria Emeagwali, and George J. Sefa Dei (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2014), xi. quietly rests on land, water, air, ancestors, spirits, and other-than-human beings. Curated by Portia Malatjie⁵Siwa Mgoboza acts as associate curator of the 2024 South African Pavilion. , Quiet Ground creates a multifaceted, affective experience at the 60th Venice Biennale 2024, enfolding the complexity of present day art making in the Global South. In Malatjie’s decolonial approach to curating, what is at stake is sovereignty. 

Installation view of Dinokana (2024) at “Quiet Ground,” the South African Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia. Courtesy and © MADEYOULOOK, photograph by Bubblegum Club.

The phenomenological range presented for the visitors’ perception offers conceptual sensuality, including opticality, orality, olfaction, hapticity, and materiality. MADEYOULOOK’s installation piece is perhaps as much about multi-layered sensing as it is about the opacity of unrepresentability⁶ Molemo Moiloa, conversation with the author, July 5, 2024. For in-depth contextual essays, see the exhibition catalogue of the 2024 South African Pavilion.. When Nozuko Mapoma, Modise Sekgothe, Lerato Moloto-Moraka and Kamogelo Gwangwa are singing in the sound installation Dinokana, a visitor unfamiliar with languages in Southern Africa likely cannot grasp the meaning. This seems to echo what Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Ngāti Awa and Ngāti Porou) has highlighted as “the politics of how these [Indigenous] worlds are being represented ‘back to’ the West⁷Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Indigenous Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London & New York, and Dunedin, Zed Books Ltd, and University of Otago Press, 1999), 37..” I therefore hope that non-Indigenous visitors, and especially “white settler subjects⁸For a useful discussion of responsibilities of non-Indigenous researchers and cultural workers, particularly in settler colonial nations, see Leah Decter, and Carla Taunton, “An Ethic of Decolonial Questioning: Exercising the Quadruple Turn in the Arts and Culture Sector,” in The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories in the United States and Canada, ed. Heather Igloliorte, and Carla Taunton (New York: Routledge, 2023), 247-260.” at the pavilion (and the Venice Biennale at large) consider their responsibility to reflect on their limitations to comprehend Indigenous spirituality, which “is one of the few parts of ourselves which the West cannot decipher, cannot understand⁹Smith, Indigenous Methodologies, 74.,” as Smith has pointed out. The 2024 South African Pavilion appears to speak to audiences on the continent, as “citizens (of their own lands)¹⁰Ibid., 69..” Encapsulated in spiritual ties to ancestral land and water, MADEYOULOOK’s Dinokana intensifies the resilience of African Indigenous knowledge.

Installation view of Dinokana (2024) at “Quiet Ground,” the South African Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia. Courtesy and © MADEYOULOOK, photograph by Bubblegum Club.

Congolese philosopher Valentin-Yves Mudimbe has described the binary classifications¹¹Noteworthy in this context is the Spanish Pavilion. Therein, Peruvian artist Sandra Gamarra Heshiki addresses representations of land, nature and heritage in Spain’s former colonies, subverting classical painting and museum displays. of colonial organisation as “destruction of traditional realms of agriculture and crafts.¹²Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), x, 4.” With redistribution and restitution still unresolved on the continent in present times, it is important to underline that the discourse of alterity during European colonialism was not only tied to physical dispossession¹³Expropriation included the Native Land Act (Act 27 of 1913), Native Trust and Land Act (Act 18 of 1936), Groups Areas Act (Act 41 of 1950) and the Population Registration Act (Act 30 of 1950). Regarding water, the Irrigation and Conservation of Waters Act (Act 8 of 1912), the Water Act (Act 54 of 1956), and the National Water Act (Act 36 of 1998) constituted the legislative framework. See Siwa Mgoboza, and Portia Malatjie, “On Quiet Ground,” in Quiet Ground (Johannesburg: The South African Pavilion, 2024), 62., but also to conceptualising the otherness of land and heritage. Since Indigenous knowledge was constructed as inferior in Western epistemologies, land implied underdevelopment and heritage meant fetish. Art historiography and white settler artists were complicit with that othering of African soil¹⁴See Michael Godby, The Lie of the Land: Representations of the South African Landscape (Cape Town: IZIKO Museums and Sanlam Art Gallery, 2010)., particularly the depiction of land as empty of Indigenous peoples, thereby playing into the hands of settler-colonial extraction of land and water. Past that drought of Western systems of thought and the “ontological nowhereness of the dispossessed in South Africa”¹⁵uMbuso Nkosi, “Land as Being,” in Quiet Ground (Johannesburg: The South African Pavilion, 2024), 13. (Nkosi), what does community resilience, of land, water, sky, people, spirits and other-than-human beings imply in contemporary art practice? At the biennale, in line with Mudimbe’s critique of “trivializing the whole traditional mode of life and its spiritual framework¹⁶Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa, 4.” in European enlightenment thinking, MADEYOULOOK flags the mechanism of alienation on African Indigenous territory. By challenging the idea of land as object (yet with respect to grieving traumatic land loss¹⁷ Molemo Moiloa, Nare Mokgotho, and uMbuso Nkosi, “Catalogue Launch of Quiet Ground,” conversation, The Forge, Johannesburg, July 31, 2024.), the installation at the 60th Venice Biennale alludes to agency. Unlike becoming a foreigner on ancestral soil under colonialism and apartheid, the artistic practice of MADEYOULOOK embraces “the ontology, agency and subjectivity of the land itself¹⁸Mgoboza and Malatjie, “On Quiet Ground,” 54.” (Mgoboza & Malatjie). By means of conceptual sensuality, the sonic landscape of the 2024 South African Pavilion marks a celebration of African futurity. Quiet Ground provides a peaceful presence of African Indigenous knowledge and spirituality. Being and sensing is enough. Just be.