The Struggle of Memory: Selected Artists II
Wangechi Mutu *1972, Nairobi, Kenya
Lives and works in New York, USA Coming to prominence in the 2000s with a series of fantastical mixed media collages and paintings featuring otherworldly female figures, Wangechi Mutu explores issues relating to sexuality, gender, race, and colonialism. Also working with sculpture, printmaking, installation, and video, she challenges the violence and misrepresentations experienced by Black women by inventing powerful alternative female identities and avatars. In prints such as Howl, 2006 and Homeward Bound, 2009-10, she combines image fragments from a wide variety of sources, creating outlandish figures. At once alluring and repellent, some appear like mutants with machine-like appendages sprouting from their bodies, while others are ambiguous animal-human hybrids. As Mutu has said, their mutated appearance is “some part disguise, some part camouflage, some part battle gear. More imaginary figures populate Mutu’s suite of works on paper, The Original Nine Daughters, 2012, which hover between vintage illustrations and Afrofuturist fantasies. Each image combines several different printmaking techniques, including etching, relief, collage, stenciling, linocut, aquatint, letterpress, and hand coloring. The series, which is testament to Mutu’s technical skills, as well as her inventiveness, refers to the origin myth of the Kikuyu Tribe, the largest ethnic group in Kenya, from which she descends. According to the legend, the tribe’s founder, Gikuyu, fathered nine daughters, each of whom founded one of the nine original clans of Kenya (the artist’s own name, in fact, derives from one of the nine daughters—Wangechi). Taking this story as her starting point, Mutu reimagines the nine daughters as wondrous hybrid creatures. Sporting claws, wings, feathers, and antennae, her characters are simultaneously unsettling and enchanting. Some are marked with pins and annotations highlighting various body parts—an allusion to Victorian scientific diagrams and the racist theories that denigrated African people in Western anthropological studies until well into the twentieth century. As with many of the artist’s works, these figures address the fragmented nature of female identity, using fantasy to draw attention to the way that women survive by inhabiting multiple roles and guises. For Mutu, they also represent a form of modern mythmaking, one that flows from a postcolonial context and which points to an imagined future, where women are unassailable and liberated from violence, racism, and misogyny.
Wangechi Mutu was the first artist to receive the Deutsche Bank’s “Artist of the Year” award in 2010.
Image: Wangechi Mutu
Homeward Bound, 2009/10
Berni Searle *1964, Cape Town, South Africa
Lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa Berni Searle has worked with lens-based media and performance since the 1990s, staging narratives addressing themes of history, identity, memory, and place, informed by her experiences of living in South Africa during apartheid and the country’s transition to democracy. Often using her own body as a point of departure, her politically and socially aware works spotlight traumas, both seen and unseen. Although her practice is rooted in the specific sociopolitical realities of South Africa, her use of poetic metaphors to address universal themes, including vulnerability, loss, and oppression, resonates beyond her local context. Searle’s Color Me series, 1998–2000, comprises photographic prints and installations derived from a performance in which she covered her naked body in differentcolored spices and flour. As a person of mixed heritage, Searle grew up with the contentious label of “colored,” a legal definition in apartheid South Africa that included anyone of mixed European and African or Asian ancestry. Her Color Me works are a symbolic gesture of resistance against this reductive and racist definition of identity that was imposed on her by the oppressive regime. In one series of images, she lies on the ground, smothered variously in thick layers of rich red paprika, yellow turmeric, brown ground cloves, and white pea flour. Her head is turned toward the camera so that her eyes meet our gaze as we survey her skin. While her choice of spices alludes to base racial stereotyping, as well as the colonial spice trade and its links to slavery, the project’s focus is the instability of identity in post-apartheid South Africa. This is explored further in the related installation Traces, 1999, in which six large digital prints hang suspended from the ceiling in two rows. Half of them feature images of Searle’s spice-covered body while the other three reveal the imprint of her absent for
m. As South African artist and curator Kathryn Smith has written, these haunting images of absence and presence highlight “the representational ‘absence’ of ‘othered’ bodies in the history, politics, and visual culture of apartheid South Africa and beyond. Carpets of spice on the floor between the images introduce fragrant scents to the gallery space while, at the bottom of each print, images of weighing scales filled with varying quantities of the different spices speak to the dehumanizing attempts to commodify and measure human worth based on race.
Image: Berni Searle
Traces, 1999
Installation view PalaisPopulaire 2023
Mikhael Subotzky *1981, Cape Town, South Africa
Lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa Attracted to the directness of documentary photography, Michael Subotzky first gained recognition in the early 2000s for his series Die Vier Hoeke (The Four Corners, 2004), in which he photographed the daily life of inmates inside the notorious Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town, near to where he was raised. He has since worked across multiple mediums, including video, film, collage, and painting. At the heart of his practice is a critical engagement with the politics of representation and the nature of narrative in visual art. His work has developed from social documentary to a specific investigation of colonial histories and various manifestations of racial and social privilege in which he, as a white South African man, acknowledges his complicity. The film installation Moses and Griffiths, 2012, was Subotzky’s first moving image work. It draws on his experiences in Makhanda (formerly known as Grahamstown), a city in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province containing many memorials to the Cape Frontier Wars (1779–1879), Southern Africa’s most protracted series of struggles by indigenous peoples against European colonizers. Projected across four screens, the work is a portrait of two Black seventy-year-old tour guides who work at colonial-era historic buildings in Grahamstown: the 1820 Settlers National Monument, built to honor the contribution of British colonists to South African society; and the Observatory Museum, which celebrates the birth of South Africa’s diamond industry. When Subotzky heard the men giving their presentations, he was astonished at how biased and narrow their accounts were, completely ignoring the violent histories of colonialism and apartheid. It was only when he asked them to tell their own stories that different narratives emerged. In the official tours filmed by Subotzky, Moses Lamani and Griffiths Sokuyeka repeat their official scripts apparently by rote. But these constructed histories give way to personalized accounts, in which each man talks about his own experiences of living and working in Grahamstown. These intimate recollections are filled with emotion and personal memories, which stand in marked contrast to the institutional narratives. According to Subotzky, both men expressed that “there was a kind of healing, in being given a forum to tell the stories they wanted [to share] rather than those that were expected of them.”
Image: Mikhael Subotzky
Moses and Griffiths, 2012
Installation view PalaisPopulaire 2023