Relentless Hosts: Lehlogolo Mashaba

Day Nine of The Lockdown Collection unveils a mixed media painting by Lehlogolo Mashaba, "Relentless Hosts."  We see the head and upper torso of a multi-colored figure, composed of two faces, one looking directly at us and the other turned down and to the right.  The Janus-like figure is composed of multiple colored shapes, some of which may be evocative of the novel coronavirus or of the human cells it attacks, as well as faintly sketched human figures, pieces of machinery, and perhaps the many houses within which we are now confined for the duration.

The artist explains: "The uncertainties of the after-life, the other side, post-human, alternative universe, rebirth, and death--these are some of the recurring themes of my work...This is the meaning of sacrifice: That an entity cannot exist without another giving itself to serve...We live in most uncertain times where our characters will be tested the most "

Mashaba's title, "Relentless Hosts" evidently speaks not so much to the way human bodies host the novel coronavirus as to the ways persons share, or at least should share, flows of information, emotions, and social bonds. We are all composed of the experiences, concepts, and memories we have received from other people, living and passed on, and we in turn give these gifts to our neighbors and our posterity.  Small delicately traced images thus seem to enter and drift off from this open composite figure, a testament to the interdependent models of the person celebrated in timeless principles of "Ubuntu," in which webs of human relationships bind the Living and the Dead, integrating mortals and the ancestral shades in mutually enriching exchanges. At the same time,  the double-headed figure signals engagement with the global aesthetic of Afrofuturism and the high-tech era of the Cyborg, composed in part of gears and other mechanical devices that extend purely organic conceptions of human life. Perhaps we see Leonardo da Vinci's "Vetruvian Man," in the next stage of his, or her,  or their, evolution.

Lehlogolo Mashab, Relentless Hosts, 2020

Emerging out of a period in which South Africa has been wracked by physical and structural xenophobic violence, directed especially against sojourners from Mozambique and Zimbabwe, this fluid, hybrid image has great resonance, re-imagining a national body that is porous and welcoming, without rigidly policed borders.  Our solidarity and compassion for one another constitute, at the end of the day, our best common defense against the virus.