Stevenson
17.07 - 06.09.2025

In a special Summer Sublet showing, STEVENSON Amsterdam hosts Tumelo Mtimkhulu’s ‘I, one drop plus one drop makes a bigger drop, not two’. The exhibition features pieces from a body of work created by Mtimkhulu during his residency with De Ateliers, an Amsterdam-based art institution that supports early-career artists from around the world.

Text is a key part of Mtimkhulu’s practice, which focuses on calling attention to and challenging dominant historical narratives. Mtimkhulu’s sharp tone points out how these inherited stories can shape, fix themselves onto and undo the individual. ‘I, one drop plus one drop makes a bigger drop, not two’, distils the artist’s use of language as a mirror that brings viewers face to face with the imprint that life leaves on us. The works presented are powerful in the vivid images they paint of the landscapes, loss and longing Mtimkhulu muses on. His words simultaneously raise a bridge that allows us to draw closer to one another in confronting the similarities in our pain and desires while illuminating the contradictions language is riddled with, which leads it to fail us and dislocate us from the other.

We are first sensitised to the weight of words in Mtimkhulu’s exhibition through the work Khafulela, which is positioned at the entrance of the gallery space. In it, four used irons etched with text stand on a floating wooden shelf. In the exhibition text, Mtimkhulu discusses how the work comments on labour and questions ideas of respectability. The “moral rectitude” the work challenges is embedded in the title Khafulela, which in isiZulu means to spit out – an action of expelling something from one’s mouth in a manner that might be viewed as distasteful to perform in front of others. In contrast, the theme of labour reveals itself through the exertion invoked by irons. However, labour is paused and, just like the weight of the implements, suspended in the work. The cool, idle metal of each iron becomes a carrier of text as opposed to exacting heat.

In transmitting text this way, Khafulela also brings to mind the issue of legibility. This comes about as the slightly varied postures and the patina of the erect irons make the words carved onto their polished surface difficult to decipher in certain places. As I adjusted my line of sight, bending and leaning for a closer look, I found myself reflecting on the limits of language and how we often need to shift our perspective to understand others. Fittingly, then, the mirrored background in the work extends our point of view, multiplying the objects and reflecting how there is always more than what meets the eye. All while the forward lean of the mirrors cuts away the tapered edges of the irons, acting as a reminder of the difficulty of grasping the whole picture. There is also an interesting connection between these pointed tips and the sharpness of Mtimkhulu’s words that, in one instance, poignantly articulates the significance of affection held within the “weight of a kiss” planted on the cheek of a lover.

Entering the main exhibition room, we meet with Mtimkhulu’s words again, this time etched and imposed into plaster and stretched across the twelve-part poem Aperture held within simple wooden frames. On a plaster surface, the black ink takes on the dusty character of a blackboard, and the text begins to read as if it were marked in white chalk. This creates an interesting association with a classroom environment, where many who take an interest in language first nurture their love of words. Importantly and connected to Mtimkhulu’s art practice, it is in these very classrooms where many of us honed our awareness of the power dynamics that lie behind how language is wielded.

Working with plaster as opposed to printing on paper becomes suggestive of how Mtimkhulu’s words need a sturdier surface to hold them. This modification can also be connected to how the artist sees the “human being as a site onto which histories/experiences/texts are written…”. Therefore, Mtimkhulu’s etched metal plates are enveloped by plaster similar to how a body is encased in a mould when capturing the contours of its form. This material quality of the works is not immediately apparent; in some places, the slightly chipped corners that were splintered during the printing process reveal the depth of the plaster. With the more complex approach of printing onto plaster, Mtimkhulu also comfortably embraces the messiness of the unevenly inked areas that create unexpected gradients of tone across the frames. One benefit of the plaster is that it does not buckle or crease under the weight of the ink, as it bears a trace of its sometimes overly generous application. 

In addition, the issue of legibility and mirroring introduced in Khafulela also appears in Aperture, as the work’s readability relies on Mtimkhulu’s inversion of the letters carved during the printing process. Somehow, this added step, which sees Mtimkhulu reconfigure the orientation of his poem for the viewer, makes me think of the adjustments and labour that come with language transmission if one wants to be understood. With this, I am reminded of Aunt Fostalina in NoViolet Bulawayo’s text We Need New Names and her laborious confrontation with “the problem with English”, specifically the difficulty and politics of its pronunciation as she tries to order a new bra over the phone.

Taking a closer look at Aperture, the twelve-part poem first addresses the viewer about the harshness of time’s simultaneous quick passing and slow-moving nature. And as I regard Mtimkhulu’s words in part one that liken us to a “sieve” through which the “pulp of each day” filters through, I quickly become aware of the ringing of a nearby church bell. The tune chimes as appropriate white noise, as one reckons with the cruel nature of time through the tender awareness of “time’s tally marks” that age the faces of our loved ones. As Mtimkhulu regards the many faces of his mother, preserved by the camera, there is a contradiction that emerges between resigning oneself to and refusing photography’s “status as taxidermy”. In contrast, language in this poem does not evade mortality as Mtimkhulu serves a sobering reminder of the lives and love we will ultimately lose to time. 

Related to losses and the passing of time, Aperture also speaks to how easily we can abandon the ease, joys and curiosities of youth for the allure of responsibilities and experiences beyond our age. This sentiment is introduced in part four, which makes an admittance of how lately, “happiness seems too juvenile”. It then reappears in part ten through Mtimkhulu’s confronting pronoun use, in this case the word “you”, as he points out a jealousy of adults’ “seriousness”, “lack of play”, “heaviness” or “how well they yield their hearts”. 

Speaking about the work made during his residency at a day of talks that were part of De Ateliers’ OFFSPRING 2025 exhibition programming, Mtimkhulu shared the following: 

“My use of the English I is preceded by the many languages that repeatedly make me, however, primarily by my home language, Sesotho, whose oral tradition finds ways to suspend the authorship of the English I¹Mtimkhulu. Offspring 2025, De Ateliers X PUB. May 25, 2025. https://pub.sandberg.nl/radio/offspring-2025.”. 

Therefore, Mtimkhulu intends for the “I” in his work to break the confines of the self and instead be born of a “people’s collective genius” that is abundant and multiplicities while still bearing “specificities” and a “threshold”²Mtimkhulu. Offspring 2025, De Ateliers X PUB. May 25, 2025. https://pub.sandberg.nl/radio/offspring-2025.. Refining my thoughts about the exhibition with this in mind, I found myself paying careful attention to how Mtimkhulu’s fluid shifts between “I”, “you”, “we” and “our” in the poem allow the viewer easy identification with the deeply personal feelings and observations the text conveys.

A trace of Mtimkhulu’s mother tongue, Sesotho, appears in part five of Aperture within a white speech bubble. Through this motif, we become privy to an intimate conversation between mother and son as she likens his image to that of his uncle, observing how “o setshwantsho sa malume oa hao”. Outside of this speech bubble, snippets of internal dialogue and lines of questioning are marked on the edges of several prints. One example is how in part seven, “A tolerant society?” is scratched into the bottom right corner of the print’s black plain of ink. There is something here in how the false perceptions we hold of ourselves and our societies can be brought tumbling down. In this work, the unassuming curves of a question mark and the indentation of quotation marks surround and erode at the words presented in search of the truth that lived experience will quickly reveal.

This critical lens of the environments Mtimkhulu finds himself in is reflected in the image he paints of the initially unfamiliar city of Amsterdam. In this regard, part seven of the poem gives a view of a night illuminated by streetlights that Mtimkhulu likens to “jaundice eyes”. The picture of yellow lights and the city at nighttime sticks with me as I think back on my time in the Netherlands. In particular, how long my body took to become trusting of the “night’s thick cloak”, whose paths could be navigated without losing my breath or sense of presence to fear.

In line with this, Mtimkhulu shares how he has only been familiar with “an ill-tailored night” that is “an accomplice to witches and thieves”. In contrast to the boldness of the “unblinking windows” in the Netherlands, Mtimkhulu recalls how, back home, “many are made to resign themselves” to the night. This contrast conjures a vivid memory of my grandmother’s evening ritual of closing the curtains (a little too early to my mother’s annoyance), and how I always found comfort in her insistence on the protection that would come as she loosened the fabric, drawing it shut like a shield over the home.

Just as quickly as the exhibition drew me into a contemplative reflection on how I relate to the images Mtimkhulu skilfully crafts, I became more aware of the busy lines that peek through the ink across the prints and the scratchiness of the mark-making in which the text is registered. Part eight is the most telling display of these acid-bite marks that emerge through the printing process. It is fitting then that this print details the harshness of nights in “Katlehong, Thokoza, Thembisa, Khayelitsha, Langa”. At the same time, Mtimkhulu is cognisant of the image he offers of his country in his work. In this regard, part nine of Aperture admits that he has “been accused of being a bad mirror” because he “parrots not moving coffins, crowded homes, the hunger of mornings or…”. His image is included in the frame as the “weatherworn streets” he is careful not to romanticise are also his. This collapses the distance that can all too easily regard black life through a flattened and essentialising gaze.

Overall, the exhibition ‘I, one drop plus one drop makes a bigger drop, not two’, shows us that Mtimkhulu’s mirror is uncompromising in its candour, yet not unkind. There is also room for us to see ourselves in the image of longing, desire, dislocation and loss that Mtimkhulu’s verses cast. With him, we grapple with the role language can play in expressing or mediating these feelings, and together we confront the deep “gulf” language cannot cover. The title of the exhibition aptly borrows from a line from Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia, which is a heartbreaking portrayal of a Russian poet’s encounter with loneliness in a foreign country and the questions of belonging that homesickness beckon. Perhaps this line also expresses a faith in the comfort and expansion community might offer us rather than an insistence on separation. And in Mtimkhulu’s exhibition, this echoes through a disruption of the “authorship” and “corporeal limits of the self” that the use of ‘I’ typically inscribes³Mtimkhulu. Offspring 2025, De Ateliers X PUB. May 25, 2025. https://pub.sandberg.nl/radio/offspring-2025..