blank
28.08 - 04.10.2025
When the song Fire on the Mountain by the Nigerian musician Asa was released in 2007, its meaning was lost on me. More than that, the lush cadence of her voice paired with the mellow strumming of her guitar seemed at odds with the lyrics, which relayed various scenes of violence and societal discontent. “I see the blood of an innocent child and everybody’s watching”, laments Asa in the first verse. In the music video, the message is driven home by the scenes of chaos that erupt around the solitary image of the singer, crooning away. The stakes are thus made apparent.
donna Kukama, Fire on the mountain (2025), Installation view at blank projects, Cape Town.
The remnants of the song linger about blank’s gallery space, where there is neither solitary singer, nor scene of postcolonial anguish. donna Kukama’s latest exhibition, the third solo exhibition with the gallery, titled ‘Fire on the mountain’, is an indictment of the postcolonial, as both moment and political posturing. The postcolonial simply becomes another liberatory enactment that is not able to unmoor its subject from the long chain of imperial and colonial domination. Postcolonial loops this quintessential subject further into the cycles of genocide, ethnocide and ecocide. The installation titled instead we counted ecocides, ethnocides, and democides conjures this failure and the broken promise of the postcolonial. In the installation named above, Xs crafted from oxidised copper are mounted against the white wall of the gallery. As Thuli Gamedze notes in the exhibition text, “the small x-shaped objects recall the now-Congo’s Katanga crosses or ‘handas’, a currency from the 19th and early 20th centuries that was cast in copper using sand molds1Thuli Gamedze, ( 2025) There is a Fire on the Mountain Exhibition Text.”. History reveals that the Katanga crosses were produced by an esoteric society. These secret coppersmiths, known as “the copper eaters”, were tasked with the extraction and casting of the copper as early as the 16th century. Bound to the mythic beliefs and ritual symbolism of the Katanga, these crosses bear fragments of the pre-colonial world. They tell a story of the political and economic sensibilities that undergirded this world. Beyond this historical significance, the X emerges as a duplicitous symbolic and aesthetic character. In the contemporary political fold, X is a symbol typically associated with representative democracy and the limited power conferred upon the individual to participate in the brokerage of power- that is, through suffrage. The X is a signifier burdened by social and epistemic valences. In mathematics, an unknown variable is often represented by a letter of the alphabet. It can be any alphabet, but commonly it is X that stands in for the unknown variable. It is this ubiquity that is appropriated by philosopher Tendayi Sithole, who in the book ‘Black X: Liberatory Thought in Azania’, makes the claim that X is a signifier that embodies the peculiar position of the black figure in the thought traditions of capitalist modernity2Tendayi Sithole (2024) Black X: Liberatory Thought in Azania, Wits University Press, Johannesburg.. The value in Sithole’s proposition lies in its articulation of the black figure as a vector that throws into crisis the coherence of capitalist modernity. Said otherwise, the black is the X sine qua non, the prime exemplar of irresolution. Thus, Kukama’s sculptural X’s, whose copper casts shine brightly in the subdued light of the gallery, serve as an ominous allusion to the political crises in Congo, Zambia and South Africa -regions that have, to various degrees, been sites of extraction of imperial mineral extraction. Here, materiel and form are used to reconcile history and memory, political inquiry and aesthetic sensibility, and in so doing portend powerful ways of reckoning and imagining.
donna Kukama, They told us that remembering would be an effort (2022).
The conversation continues. In they told us that remembering would be an effort, abstract form dances on a medium-sized canvas. Thick swathes of black acrylic paint languish in the company of gold and copper tones, gesturing us towards the mineral industrial complex and those ensnared by its extractive grasp. The question of form as it is presented by Kukama, turns us towards the dancer and theorist, Mlondolozi Zondi, who avers that choreography and colonialism share a defining feature of order and arrangement3 Mlondolozi Zondi (2024) An Impossible Form: The Absence that Keeps on Giving, Liquid Blackness, p 29.. The turn towards dance and the choreography are apt, given the underlying metaphor of music and the appropriation of Asa’s song that serves as the thematic and aesthetic pulse of the exhibition. On form, Zondi writes that: “contemporary African dancers such as Nelisiwe Xaba, Dana Michel, Mayfield brooks, Boyzie Cekwana, amongst others have displayed an indifference to canonical Western dance techniques” and have rather foregrounded black vernacular dance modes that have always been incapable of perfect form. These, according to Zondi, are forms that negate rigid structure and embody a practice of anarrangement- a black aesthetic operation that is neither the arrangement nor the rearrangement of the choreographic apparatus4 Mlondolozi Zondi (2024) An Impossible Form: The Absence that Keeps on Giving, Liquid Blackness, p 30.”. To a large degree, this is the case for Kukama’s exhibition, whose works, such they told us that remembering would be an effort might be viewed as an aesthetic operation that interrogates the subject of mineral exploitation – the black mine worker who is available to the whims of technocapitalism. Saidiya Hartman names this subject doubly as the subject of exploitation and accumulation5 Saidiya Hartman and Fank B Wilderson, III (2003) The Position of the unthought , Qui Parle, p 184. . They simultaneously embody such an existence, or dance between the two, disavowing the boundaries of political and social legibility. This is the case for the child labourer in the Democratic Republic of Congo, whose political crisis perpetually escapes political coherence. Or Zambia, where a Chinese-owned copper mine contaminated the Kafue River after a dam collapse allowed 50 million tons of waste into the river. Or South Africa, where the legacies of gold mining are embodied most viscerally by the figure of the Zama Zama, black artisanal miners who labour in disused mines under dangerous and increasingly questionable conditions – i.e. as persons trafficked by transnational syndicates. Kukama’s work thus points to art’s uncanny ability to speak the ineluctable, particularly that which has deep political and metaphysical consequences.
donna Kukama, Over and over, all over again (2025).
Another work that has been etched into my psyche is Over and over, all over again. The idea of repetition boldly carried by the name, the work itself carries the incoherence of the age. Installed against the wall a steel sculpture cuts a capturing image. Made from plasma-cut steel, worked into a series of loops, the work takes on the form of a signature. It compellingly returns us to the moment of choreography and arrangement. It is the consequence of stylised acts, a sort of performance that nonetheless resists legibility. The steel jumps and loops itself into a bold sculptural rendition that converses with the other works of water-based enamel, acrylic and graphite etched on aluminium and previous works made of plasma cut steel, indicating a process of continuation and reflective dialogue.
Using form, materiality and the lingering resonances of history, Kukama entreats us to look differently at the present. Her artistic interventions rage back at the defining features of colonialism -order and formal arrangement. The sign, the song and the story are woven into a powerful aesthetic intervention.
donna Kukama, Fire on the mountain (2025), Installation view at blank projects, Cape Town.
