Moshekwa Langa
Current Review(s)
'Thresholds'
Moshekwa Langa at Goodman GalleryMoshekwa Langa has a reputation for being unpredictable in exhibitions. Generally not, however, because of occasional wavering in the success of his works, but because he tends to skip between media with the agility of a mountain goat. He is known best by some for his abstract painted fields of text and collage and by others for his installations of industrial cotton reels and empty bottles. The latter manifested in the 53rd Venice Biennale as a reincarnation of a work first produced for the second Johannesburg Biennale, ‘Graft’ (1997-8) titled Temporal Distance (With Criminal Intent) You Will Find Us in the Best Places.
In 'Thresholds', Langa’s recent offering at the Johannesburg Goodman Gallery, the artist delivers his most unprecedented curveball yet, a body of photographic and video ‘documentary’ material of three kinds of traditional ceremonies practiced in his hometown of Bakenberg in Limpopo Province. In addition to the dozens of portraits of young men in traditional garb that populated the walls of the gallery, Langa shows us – without our really knowing what we are being shown – video footage of male and female ceremonies of induction into adulthood, and a funerary ceremony. These pieces are interspersed with large abstract works on paper and, in one corner, an improvised shrine to a lover recently killed in a car accident. None of these works have been titled, captioned or in any other way prefaced, which leaves us, the viewers, to scrounge for meaning in a bewildering field of equivalences as if we were trying to make sense of the patterns of flotsam on a temperamental beach.
The premise of 'Thresholds', as told in a short introductory text concocted by the Goodman Gallery, is Langa’s return to his home as an observer, after having left Bakenberg at the age of thirteen.The exhibition is an assembly of traces recording 'a modern man observing the traditional rituals of his birthplace'.
What emerges from this utterance is that two matters and their related problems are, wittingly or not, of central importance in this exhibition: firstly, the potential overlap between biography and autobiography and the necessity in both cases for legibility, and secondly, the relationship between observation and interpretation.
26 November 2009 - 18 December 2009
Listings(s)
'Thresholds'
Moshekwa Langa at Goodman GalleryIn this solo ehxibition Moshekwa Langa examines tradition and rootedness in his own life by looking to culture in his hometown of Harmansdal in Limpopo Province for his subject matter. This manifests most clearly in the exhibition in a collection of photographs and a video installation that resemble anthropological documentary material.
26 November 2009 - 18 December 2009
'There is always a cup of sea to sail in': The 29th Sao Paulo Biennial
David Goldblatt, Kendell Geers and Moshekwa Langa at Bienal de Sao PauloThe 29th Bienal de São Paulo is anchored in the notion that it is impossible to separate art from politics. Such impossibility is expressed in the fact that art is capable of blocking the sensorial coordinates through which we understand and inhabit the world by bringing into it themes and attitudes that did not previously fit in. The title chosen for the 29th Bienal de São Paulo, 'There is always a cup of sea to sail in' - a quotation borrowed from the Brazilian poet Jorge de Lima’s major work Invenção de Orfeu (1952) – epitomizes what the Bienal seeks to achieve: to assert that the utopian dimension of art is contained within itself, not without it or beyond it. It is in the 'cup of sea' – the near infinite where artists produce their work – that the power lies to move forward.
The exhibition is organised according to six issues relating to political thought and action through art. Unfolding within a poetic and integrated curatorial space, these six 'terrains' are as follows: 'The skin of the invisible'; 'Said, unsaid, forbidden'; 'I am the street'; 'Remembrance and oblivion'; 'Far away, right here'; and 'The other, the same'.
25 September 2010 - 12 December 2010
'Marhumbini – In Another Time'
Moshekwa Langa at Kunsthalle BernNot confined to one particular medium, Langa's work consists of gouaches, collages, photographs, expansive installations, and videos. They all reference the larger worlds of art, politics, and popular culture: just like Langa layers diverse materials, he piles up meanings and references that are often cryptic and ambivalent, yet resonant. With his drawings and gouaches, he demonstrates his definition of creativity as the freedom to make links, the freedom to connect heterogeneous elements. Using methods of abstract expression, free association and stream of consciousness, the artist allows work to be created, as it were. The viewing experience of Moshekwa Langa's untranslatable visualisations is sensuous and seductive.
The project Moshekwa Langa developed for Kunsthalle Bern deals with loss. It features reworked drawings, gouaches and collages originally created in South Africa. The works on exhibition are suffused with memories of Langa's loved ones and they index the experience and subsequent coming to terms with an accident — they are manifestations of 'Trauerarbeit', to use Freud's term.
05 February 2011 - 27 March 2011
