Norval Foundation
11.09 - 10.01.2026

In ‘Umkhangu/Birthmark’ at the Norval Foundation, Sthenjwa Luthuli offers a potent antidote to what Carl Jung described as an age that seeks to “standardise and mass-produce the ‘normal’ human being.” For Jung, true personality—the “fullness of life”—is the ultimate human aim, and history’s great liberating deeds spring not from the inert mass, but from individuals who have confronted their unconscious depths. Luthuli’s work provides the signposts for this very journey, mapping a path to a Self that is uniquely grounded in the African world.

The negotiation of personality, the Self’s unfolding between individual, ancestry and history, sits at the centre of much modern African art. Luthuli’s exhibition articulates a vital concern: the ancestral calling, or the psyche’s pull to draw the ego into the unconscious and into history. His distinctive power lies in not only capturing this pull but in visualising the profound benefits of answering it: the emergence of an individuated personality.

In the African context, the benefit of individuation is a Self that cannot be captured by propaganda, historical lies, or inherited narratives of inferiority. As Sylvia Wynter argues, colonial modernity invented “Man” as a genre that positioned African people as incomplete. This invention seduces the psyche toward assimilation, producing a false self, eternally vulnerable to external validation. W.E.B. Du Bois named this psychic trap “double-consciousness,” the torment of seeing oneself through the eyes of a racist world. Individuation counters this by grounding the individual in a Self not authored by colonial narratives. It dissolves the double bind not by rejecting history, but by integrating the ancestral psyche that the colonial gaze tried to erase.

The work Unfinished Business evokes this process. A headless figure, carved from wood yet gleaming, strides through a constellation of spheres. Within its torso, countless faces, spiritual masks, descend into blackness. The absent head signifies the ego’s surrender, the crucial first step in Jungian individuation. Luthuli roots this universal process in a specific African lexicon: his carved surfaces echo masks; his kaleidoscopic patterns reinvent textile and beadwork traditions, invoking the colour language of artists like Esther Mahlangu.

The figure holds a brown rope loosely—a potent, multivalent symbol. It connects the individual to the ancestors whose unfinished lives it carries, yet its slack grip signals integration, not bondage. This reflects the ancestral calling as a force that demands a sacrifice of the ego’s ordinary life, not to bind, but to re-bind the individual into a more complete whole. The “unfinished business” is thus our own ongoing reconciliation with the past.

This reincarnation is psychological. In Xhosa cosmology, one called to serve the ancestors may be referred to as Gogo, embodying the presence of those who came before. Luthuli visualises this when masks reside within a single body, suggesting that individuation draws upon accumulated spiritual and cultural material. This stands in contrast to Enlightenment thought, which often abstracted the individual from communal roots. Luthuli’s practice asserts an African approach to selfhood: one where lineage and memory are constitutive of individuality.

The theme of duality unfolds in Inner Spark, where two headless, sexless beings dance. They hover between masculine and feminine—what Jung termed the anima and animus, portals to the unconscious. Their dance enacts the union of opposites, a necessary reconciliation in a post-apartheid reality where inner conflicts are projected onto the social field. We assign greed to “white monopoly capital” and corruption as inherently Black; these stereotypes are psychic traps that possess rather than free us. Luthuli’s work, echoing thinkers like Frantz Fanon and Achille Mbembe, invites us inward to heal this inner bewitchment.

In Reborn, we see the struggle of this unbinding. Two acrobatic beings are mid-flight; one is bound by a green rope while another, an ancestral presence, seeks to free it. This is individuation as a guided pursuit. In a context where spiritual heritage has eroded, the void is often filled by a desire for assimilation, producing the false self. This is starkly illustrated by the consumption-driven looting of state resources, where material gain is pursued despite collective suffering.

The ego fears this death, yet the death of the ego is the birth of personality. To integrate the unconscious is to accept that our inheritance is both wound and wisdom. Jung called this the transcendent function: the capacity to hold the tension of opposites until a new consciousness emerges. The push for assimilation into modernity can sever the connection to ancestry; Luthuli’s work compensates for this loss, restoring the spiritual dimension that grounds the individual.

The exhibition culminates in Stories We Wear, where a figure lifts a treasure behind clusters of string-like spheres. These forms echo the ropes of earlier works, but here they are woven into a new pattern. This reveals the cyclical nature of the work: it is never finished. Each generation carries the ‘unfinished business’ forward, transforming it in the process.

Through ‘Umkhangu/Birthmark’, Luthuli offers mirrors for the psyche. His headless beings remind us that liberating deeds spring from leading personalities, yet in South Africa, this individuality is held within the philosophy of umntu ngumntu ngabantu. This concept, often interpreted socially, contains a profound spiritual truth: we are who we are because of those who came before. This is the heart of the exhibition.

Thus, the descent into the unconscious is necessary. It is a risk—the ego’s terror of dissolving—that leads to the formation of a greater personality. Luthuli’s exhibition is a masterful visualisation of this descent, illustrating that our moment is one of restitution for the African mind and soul. This restitution means finally encountering the world not from a place of colonial wounding, but as a greater personality, grounded in the past and striding into the future.