Mamiya

In the mixed-media triptych Our Mother (2012) – a subtle inversion of the Lord’s Prayer – we witness a languid metamorphosis towards some revelation. That is, from the empty shades of grey depicted on the first panel, the series moves to abstracted figuration in the third. Here it is as if Mashalaba suggests some state of becoming mother, an emergence which remains, however, elusive. The work maintains a perpetual suspense, coaxing the viewer to patiently wait for the Godot-esque mother. This open-endedness is furthered by the scattered hanging of the triptych, requiring of us a labour-intensive search for some set of relations between these triplets from different races. There is no doubt that Mashalaba’s drawing refers to biblical narratives, especially with themes relating to the place or displacement of women in societal structures. 

In the work Intombi Yomntu (2012) we see a replication of a photograph (Umafungwashe, in a different room) a few feet from the painting. In it the artist’s older sister, Nodumo, is depicted holding the artist as a toddler on her lap. Continuing with Mashalaba’s sketchy semi-monochromatic palette, the piece almost covers the entire wall. Here the sister, as it were, becomes the surrogate mother holding the naked Nomthunzi, something common to most households. Again the biblical resonance in the work is unmistakable – that of the age-old mother and child. 

The artist’s motivation for positing drawing as a means of reproducing the photograph while the photograph remains present in some cases, is uncertain. The quality of the drawn reproduction is quite mundane and whether this is intentionally done or not it does not reflect the artist’s conceptual or technical agility. We could differentiate between intention and production, as the religious themes are traceable in most of Mashalaba’s works. This is not a coincidence as the artist’s father was a pastor. The uncomfortable issue sitting at the centre of her work is that of the woman, onto which ‘Mamiya’ has been repeatedly projected but unsatisfactorily rendered.  

Relief comes, however, on entering the second room, where the artist hides two interesting digital prints, a series called Ilifa (2012). To use another religious reference 'the first shall be last' – it seems to me that the first room should have been last. Ilifa’s greyish imagery shows the artist’s head from the back, as her digitally manipulated braided tresses form a palimpsest. Ilifa literally means ‘heir’ or heritage, linking the artist’s hair with the notion of inheritance. The history of black oppression is indeed a history of bodily violation throughout which the body is stripped and clad anew. Mashalaba’s series reminds me of a scene in Ousame Sembene’s Ceddo where the imam orders that the kidnapped bodies be shaved of their hair and thus given a new identity. Generally in the transition from historical enslavement to modern forms of incarceration, hair is a source of contention. Anti-colonial movements often resisted cutting or shaving hair, and Mashalaba’s prints resonate with this sentiment. Mashalaba drags us didactically into her central thesis – the woman question – and, as if supplementing Barbara Kruger, the artist turns her back to us. On the surface the hair moves in Medusian style, claiming a power over life and beauty with a subtlety that antagonizes history.

Though the emotive specificity of subjects explored in ‘Mamiya’ is valuable, we cannot ignore the fact that the show in general is at times mediocre in its arrangement and execution. At times the artist’s intentions are not sufficiently represented in her depictions. In a sense this seems fitting in that ‘Mamiya’ has been the subject of an old problem. The ghostliness of ‘Mamiya’s manifestation in this case left me rather dissatisfied and though Mashalaba’s domestic recipe of components may be fresh, her final concoction proved to be fairly flat.