THK Gallery
12.09 - 26.10.2024
I’ve never lived in any other time, and I know full well that every age is characterised by its own crisis. I know too that every generation feels its crisis acutely. I cannot help but think however, that those of us living through the age of neoliberalism are particularly damned. This damnation is not due to singular or even sets of political crises. To be fair, our present is haunted by the same old ghosts that haunted the past; wars, imperialism, ecological decline, etc. Perhaps what is at stake is that as Ian Baucom1Ian Baucom (2001) Specters of the Atlantic, The South Atlantic Quarterly, pp 61-82. suggests, time does not pass, it accumulates, most densely, perhaps, within the wake of those-modernity forming “spaces of flow” that governed and drove our long twentieth century’s cycles of capital accumulation. I do not know what the future holds, I am reluctant to even think of a future beyond the now. Nonetheless, I feel somehow that the neoliberal moment marks the highest point of this temporal accumulation. Our present is saturated with “those modernity-forming spaces of flow2 Ian Baucom (2001) Specters of the Atlantic, The South Atlantic Quarterly, pp 61-82”.
If this is indeed the case, Vusi’s Nkomo’s ‘Propositions for dis-order’ marks the moment of that which comes after the dizzying crescendo, the moment that proceeds the climax. Within the contained space of the gallery, racial modernity has already burst its seams. Its constituting forms litter the gallery floor. It is after this occasion of eruption that one encounters a legacy of historical disarray. Lucky for us, as Sara-Maria Sorentino3 Sara-Maria Sorentino (2024) Money, Slavery, Myth, Society and Space, pp 338-357. notes, history has become a metaphor with its own standard units of time and subject. What appears as a series of isolated historical nodes gestures to the very unruliness of racial capital’s political fabric and leads us to the conclusion that a chronological telling cannot hope to map the logic and telos of racial modernity. This is why Nkomo’s intervention is so apt. It resists a unidirectional historical trajectory, but uses multiple, seemingly historically desperate nodes to represent the slave, labourer, human nexus4 Sara-Maria Sorentino (2024) Money, Slavery, Myth, Society and Space, pp 338-357. and its imbrication within an economic and capitalist constellation. The present thus represents a moment of acute crisis, which is useful in that it catalyses a deeper interrogation of the liberal democratic project and its concomitant fictions, but also presents us with an opportunity to charter the ways global capital continues to live off the total value expropriated from the slave’s labour and from native lands5 Denise Ferreira Da Silva (2022) Unpayable Debt: Reading Scenes of Value against the Arrow of Time, pp 81- 113. .
Installation View | Vusumzi Nkomo, Propositions for dis-order, 2024, THK Gallery, Cape Town
As one enters the gallery, one is met by what appears to be large collages of maps, framed onto the floor. A ballast ball is to one corner of the frame. It sits menacingly, over the maps whose rusted colour invokes some bygone era, some irretrievable historical moment. I do not want to start crafting intricate metaphoric relations where perhaps there is no idiomatic symbolism to be assigned. What I want to do is reach over to the bowl of iron-cast ballasts that accompanies this scene and see if I can’t hit the other ball. I resist the urge to do so. Rather, I gaze over to my left where I encounter a thick rope suspended from the gallery wall and into a bucket of water. Caked with what I know is salt- its crystals illuminated by the bright gallery lights; the salt beckons me towards a vast interpretive field. I can no longer resist the urge to reach for metaphoric meaning. It is not so much the ocean that is conjured, nor the Caribbean archipelago with its salt pans, which slaves harvested under the surveillant eyes of the master, it is really the relationships between the ballast and the slave trade that gestures towards the Atlantic as the primal scene, in the making of value, and here I do not want to be misunderstood, not the ascription of value but the very construction of value as an idea, a modality – that is a form of assigning equivalence or establishing commensurability.
Installation View | Vusumzi Nkomo, Propositions for dis-order, 2024, THK Gallery, Cape Town
The dialogue is not that readily legible however because the question of race and the role of the slave in the construction of value are themselves intricate and evasive. The installation in the corner of the second floor, a series of smaller iron cast balls, what could be marbles, are blockaded by a singular concrete block. Unruly, yet contained, this setting is governed by an internal logic requiring articulation. It is this unbeknown logic that initiates a deeper speculative foray. This scene alludes firstly to a game, a contained system where the rules are arbitrarily determined. Only this is not a contained system, as the units of the game (the iron marbles) are always at risk of slipping beyond the system given the poor efficacy of the barricade. The control of these units is dependent on the player (the gallery viewer is encouraged to “play” the game) effectively controlling the units from slipping beyond the frame of the installation. I take this as a reference to the Atlantic world as a poorly contained system, whose systematicities are arbitrarily assigned- that is they are important in so much as they legitimate the Atlantic project but are not in themselves natural or innately just. Here we might think of the fiduciary instruments that lubricated the slave trade, credit, interest, insurance and money amongst others. Moreover, we might establish that the rules that govern the game, have profound implications, implications that spill out beyond the Atlantic moment and charter the ontological boundaries of blackness. This staging of the capitalist game allows us then to come to terms with the quagmire that is racial capital, and ponder on how as Sorentino writes, “slavery, exerts an important role in the story of capitalism, not only as a vanishing mediator for “modes of production” or forms of exploitation”, a certain monetary form of domination that translates the movement from contingency to necessity, from direct coercion to exploitation-through-equality6Sara-Maria Sorentino (2024) Money, Slavery, Myth, Society and Space, pp 338-357.”.
This is enacted once more in the linguistic play offered by the framed signs that hang in sections of the gallery space. Lettered in gold glitter against a black backdrop, the one that sticks out in my mind reads “my days are numbers”. The decadence of the lettering – gold- connotes luxury and the message of the grammar indexes one of the multiple contradictions that burden the black. The message is clear, it returns us to the site where coinage (represented in gold) and blackness wage their most explicit struggle, the Atlantic world whereas Sorentino7Sara-Maria Sorentino (2024) Money, Slavery, Myth, Society and Space, pp 338-357. avers “racial slavery stands at the origin of sea-changes in the money form- the origins of the market, the origins of the financial system. Whilst the glitter moves us toward the neoliberal moment where David Marriot8 David Marriott (2017) On Decadence: Bling-Bling, e-Flux Journal, pp 1-10. insists that blackness must be put to work as the figure of endless unproductive labour or otherwise run the risk of asserting itself “as an exaggerated inflated figure of inflation”. This in other words refers to the way that blackness puffs itself up when possessed of capital and is fundamentally a sign of decadent inutility. “My days are numbers” relays then how blackness and coinage are enmeshed in an inextricable embrace and exposes the anxiety around historical and capital accumulation. When will modernity run out of numbers? When will it implode from the excess of racial modernity and capitalist desire?
Installation View | Vusumzi Nkomo, Propositions for dis-order, 2024, THK Gallery, Cape Town
But Nkomo’s aesthetic inquisition is not limited to the material. The very substance of the intervention is concerned with abstraction, i.e. how the abstract language that gives capital its enduring form is determined by blackness but similarly to the extent to which value is abstract not simply from the black body, but from blackness itself. The symbolic negation of blackness then serves as ground zero upon which all other forms of racialised being are valued and legitimated. Nkomo also proposes a new mode of recognising black practices of abstractions, by presenting what might be thought of as forms liberated from the corporeality and even spectrality of blackness, in a manner that creates a space to as Mlondolozi Zondi9Mlondolozi Zondi (2024) “An Impossible form, The Absence that Keeps on Giving”, liquid blackness writes “contend with a form or being, whose absence and exorbitance equally gift Western modernity/modernism its form”. As we move through the gallery floor and experience all the sites of interlocution, as we apprehend the virtual forms that swirl around the black- time, credit, history, entropy, teleology, fungibility- we begin to reconcile ourselves with what blackness has granted capitalism. We ponder also what black artistic and aesthetic forms grant the subject trapped within the spectre of racial modernity – a language with which to render the indictment.
