Archive: Issue No. 73, September 2003

Colbert Mashile, currently a Masters student at Wits University, has become well known for his work representing circumcision initiation rites. Coming from the Mapulana clan (of the Northern Sotho Pedi tribe) he was initiated when he was ten. His current exhibition at the NSA however does not include any work on that topic though his interest continues to focus on what he loosely terms "African ceremonies".

In this exhibition he concentrates on the Bogwera ritual - a ceremony where past initiates move to the next level of adulthood. Experienced at night when the darkness increases the sense of mystery and the unknown, the ritual is dominated by a structure that is occupied by a 'dancer' who moves it around challenging the courage of the participants. This structure is represented in a number of the works as either a mound or a cage-like construction and becomes a key motif in the work, echoing or merging with the landscape forms.

Unlike Hilton Barber's photographs of initiation rites, which suffered a barrage of criticism for exposing a secret and sacred ritual to an uninitiated public, Mashile's work avoids such charges by the nature of it being an insider's quest to capture a particular internal experience. Formally the work hovers between figuration and abstraction - a double language that serves Mashile well, both revealing and veiling the subject and avoiding the voyeurism that is sometimes associated with the camera.

Finding his images intuitively Mashile patently enjoys the engagement with his media. Generating organically rich surface textures by pooling watercolour and gouache on the surface of the paper Mashile creates loose shapes that become the ground for drawn forms that allude to the recognisable, but avoid particularisation. Images of the landscape are both literal and metaphorical, reflecting the testing terrain that initiates find themselves in both physically and emotionally. Small marks and flecks on the paper transmute into the insects, ticks and lice that plague initiates while scratches mark the body, as land becomes flesh.

Mashile's work has a wonderful materiality. Reinvigorating the tradition of watercolour, so often associated with soft visualisations of the European landscape, he creates forms that are monumental and intrinsically African. Visually holding the eye first, and then engaging the mind, allows for viewers to be drawn into the images without them having to know what they are. This allows the work to bridge cultural difference, engaging - not distancing - viewers of varying backgrounds.

Submitted to a healthy level of self-criticism (Mashile is known to tear up as much as he exhibits) the show exhibits a remarkable evenness of production making it difficult to pick out one work in preference to another and finally producing a remarkably strong show.

Above in the mezzanine Njabulo Hlongwane exhibits a group of acrylic paintings under the title 'Spiritual Journey'. Almost exclusively depicting the upper torsos of limbless figures floating above various landscapes, the images are disconcerting, particularly given the recent news focus on the atrocities committed in Sierra Leone where the amputation of the limbs of hapless civilians was a regular terror strategy. However, such a negative reading of Hlongwane's figures is not intended. For Hlongwane these are not corporeal manifestations, but spiritual ones - figures who ostensibly do not need physical abilities and therefore do not need the trappings of the able physical body.

The first of these images arose when Hlongwane painted an image entitled Holy Herb, an image exploring the effects of marijuana as a mind-expanding drug. Interested in alternative states of being Hlongwane reads the drug-induced state as a spiritual one and, wanting to express this side of the habit, he posed the figures in prayerful posture. The silhouette of the gesture produced these strangely dislocated figures.

The readings of the figures as empty vessels, truncated and free-floating however also exists and is perhaps best utilised when Hlongwane depicts what he describes as the lost souls that wander the planet, people who are dispossessed either materially or spiritually.

Verging on the formulaic and lacking the fluency of Mashile's work Hlongwane's show nonetheless exhibits a certain visual conviction. Chunky and satisfyingly occupying space, these idiosyncratic forms provide visions that are a curious mixture of indigenous tradition and personal symbology.

Closes: September 7