Coach: Thenjiwe Nkosi

Day 19 of South Africa's "Lockdown Collection" presents an in-process work by Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, "Coach (pencil and watercolor on paper). A young female figure in a red leotard ,with pink chevrons on the sleeves, walks beside an older male figure in blue jeans, who gestures with his right hand as he speaks to her. Behind the walking figures are two shapes, perhaps thick mats forming a raised competition space; the lower shape is blue, the color of the man's jeans, and the upper shape is red, the color of the young woman's leotard. Read another way, the red and blue lines radiate out and upward from the male figure.

Artist's Statement:  I started working on this piece a few days ago when the lockdown in South Africa was extended. I have had to take some time to reorientate my mind and expectations, and I feel that this work is reflective of this: To keep moving forward during this period, I feel like I need to find a fresh determination and focus. Even amid the difficult and sometimes scary feelings arising. Even when I feel small and anxious. I have had to coach myself through this, and in doing so I have returned to some of the materials I used at the very beginning of my career as an artist - pencils and watercolours.

It's becoming clear to all of us that life will not go back to what it was before. And I don't wish that for myself, or for any of us. Things need to change, at this moment I'm interested in what the wisdom of the past has to offer in helping to guide into this uncertain future.

Pam Allara:  In 2012, artist Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi found a Google image of a gymnastics event in which all the participants were white, and decided to tranform the photograph into a painting where the participants were all black. Both gender and race are central concerns of the gymnastics series. According to an article from Document magazine listed on Nkosi’s website, gymnastics as a sport was founded by a Danish Nazi supporter, Niels Bukh as a “vehicle for white supremacy,” through white’s physical perfection. Although the sport has both male and female competitors, the females tend to draw the most media attention. In that way, it also serves as yet another vehicle for the surveillance of women’s bodies. When the body is both female and black, the intense surveillance is no doubt doubled, as Nkosi’s comments about the performativity of the black body in public underscore.

In her paintings from the Gymnatics series, available on the Stevenson Gallery  website, (the Johannesburg opening having been canceled due to the lockdown), the lithe , black bodies of young girls are arranged in varying formations whose organic shapes contrast with the rigid geometry  of the mats on which they perform, an obvious metaphor for the precision required of their bodies during competition. When white robed judges are present, they look like surgeons overseeing an operation.

Coach, Nkosi’s new drawing, is more intimate than the larger paintings. Here I imagine that the young girl is leaving with her coach after a workout or a competition. The two stacked mats are angled to draw attention to the figures, but whereas the mats are the same size, the figures are not.  Although the facial features of both are obscured, the large male figure’s gesture indicates that he is in the process of coaching, providing advice that the gymnast appears to be absorbing. The gender hierarchy is clear: the male dispenses wisdom that the female must accept without questioning. Both figures are black, but surely it is not an accident that coach’s prominent shirt is white. There is no doubt another hierarchy stemming from the history of the sport that he has absorbed.

Nkosi is interested in “What the wisdom of the past has to offer in helping to guide us into this uncertain future.”  To me, Coach is a cautionary tale that warns us that not all the past has to offer is necessarily wise.

Mark Auslander: As Pam notes, this work extends the artist's interest in decolonizing the space of the gymnasium and the sport of gymnastics. This theme is explored in Nkosi's large wall painting, "Gynmnasium," commissioned for the Africa Center (New York) and opened soon before the Covid-19 pandemic erupted.  Thenjiwe Nkosi has written of close affinities between the gymnast and the artist: "The artist, like the gymnast, is a performer (if at times a reluctant performer) whose actions are subjected to constant scrutiny, for whom increasing exposure brings a heightened experience of vulnerability." (Africa Center)   In her Gymnastics series the artist has been particularly fascinated by efforts to challenge racial hierarchies embedded in women's gymnastics, long a bastion of elite white privilege.

Thenijwe Nkosi, "Coach" (2020: in process)

I am unclear if the male coach is to be read as ominous or benevolent. Given the recent horrific history of women's gymnastics, in which over 500 girls and young women were sexually assaulted over the course of three decades by a senior male serial predator, who operated with impunity as a prominent physician and coaching team member, some viewers may be taken aback by the image of a male coach towering over a young female gymnast. Perhaps as Pam suggests, the artist signals the vulnerability of the young and is suggesting the need to be cautious or critical about those in authority--in gymnastics, the arts, or any field of endeavor.

Alternately, we may not be intended to read the coach as an external danger.  The artist writes in her statement of needing to "coach" herself during this difficult and disorienting period of extended lockdown. The older gymnastics coach who walks besides the young woman might perhaps,  be regarded as an external projection of the artist/gymnast herself, as well as the "wisdom of the past," which the artist writes of.  (All of us in this time of confinement within our homes surely find ourselves engaged in many conversations with ourselves, or replaying conversations we might want to have with those no longer with us.)  The large blue and red shapes behind the walking figures might constitute a raised arena (a boxing ring?) in which the gymnast might compete on thick mats (featured in some of the artist's earlier work in the Gymnastics series). Or perhaps they are a pair of canvases upon which the artist might create new work.  They could even be read as enormous books, to be consulted as we seek guidance from the accumulated knowledge of the ages in seeking a way forward.

The fact that the fronts of these two shapes radiate from the white-shirted male figure in an upward "V" might suggest that he has wings, and that he is a guardian angel walking beside the young woman in her hour of greatest need. He might even, in the idiom of Nguni cosmology, be conceived of as a benevolent ancestral shade, guiding his descendant to find a new pathway through life's challenges.  In any event, the fact that the colors of the blue and red shapes echo the hues of the two individuals' clothing may reinforce the sense that these are in fact aspects of the same person, engaged in a necessary internal dialogue of reflection, discovery, and quiet transformation.