‘Onder die Reenboog Strale’
Dathini Mzayiya at Greatmore StudiosDathini Mzayiya celebrates the completion of his tenure at Greatmore Studios with a retrospective exhibition entitled ‘Onder die Reënboog Strale’, translated in English as 'under the rainbow rays’.
‘Onder die Reenboog Strale’ unpacks the hype of post-apartheid South Africa as a rainbow nation. If art is a mirror of society then Dathini Mzayiya’s work is a full-length mirror of the contradictory nature of the space we call South Africa.
As the title suggests, the exhibition takes the biblical allusion of the rainbow as a fiction on which post-apartheid national identity has been imagined. Whilst marginalized South Africans are metaphorically kneeling, looking up to the skies without any guarantees of redemption or of a different life, the symbols of the rainbow nation appear increasingly hollow. The rainbow’s mysterious beauty blends colour through prisms of water and sunlight. Yet, unproblematically, it has been imposed as a political image of reconciliation and as a theological sign of hope and peace.
The rainbow is an illusion of light and reflection, so the artist includes these tools to examine the farce and the tragedy of the failed pretence of reconciliation. Working from the everyday experience of life ‘under the rainbow’, Mzayiya’s subjects are both overlooking and under looking; they are bosses, landlords and security guards, white; they are beggars with children, job seekers, landless, pavement-dwellers, maids, black. Mzayiya observes layers of racialised violence that mark everyday social and economic interactions. And he notices structural violence that is so normalized it is not regarded as worth noticing.
28 February - 15 March
