Wait in Anticipation to See the Future: Bambo Sibiya

Day 18 of South Africa's The Lockdown Collection highlights a new acrylic and charcoal painting by Bambo Sibiya, "Wait in Anticipation to See the Future" (2020). A figure whom the artist identifies as a "matriarch" (but who may have a beard and mustache) wears a tied head-wrap and a red-brown robe. She sits on an upholstered chair, in one quarter profile, her eyes looking out at us, her left hand raised towards her chin. She wears a large white lace shawl, with a smaller, darker lace shrug over her shoulders, The background is dominated by vertical dark columns, in front of a wallpaper-like backing. The right arm is covered with a band or bandage in the wrist area, and perhaps another band around the elbow. Five dark circular shapes are visible along the lower border of the white shawl.
The domesticity of the scene is emphasized by wallpaper, in a lace like pattern behind the "bars', and a lace panel running horizontally behind the figure's midsection. The sitter's feet rest on a kind of raised platform (sharing the same red-brown color as the robe), below which the vertical bars continue.

Artist's Remarks:  The idea for this work came to me over Lockdown. It’s about the people sitting at home alone. The woman is waiting in anticipation…deep in thought about what will be the outcome of this time.
 
My Mom calls me all the time to see if I am OK. And I realise there are so many people who are both so worried and stuck where they are.  They could not go home. They want to be with their loved ones.

The woman (matriarch) represents all the women waiting.  She is dressed in a traditional gown looking worried, and thinking of her loved ones at home.

This situation is out of our hands; we are separated from each other……We are also all locked in.

[The  pandemic] is  by far the biggest threat we all have had to face…not just here but across the world.

I feel like we should take a pause and reflect on our life.

It is like the Universe is angry.



Pamela Allara;   Trained as a printmaker at Artist Proof Studio in Johannesburg, Bambo Sibiya’s paintings often have the same intense detail as his linocuts. This is true as well for his submission to The Lockdown Collection. One would expect one’s eye to be overwhelmed by the intricate designs of the European-style wallpaper and the layered clothing, but the sitter’s imposing volume keeps all the visual activity in check.

Sibya is known for his depiction of the subculture of the mining industry. His work depicts the activities of men who are separated from their homes, engaging in group activities such as music, board games, and fashion (Swenkas). https://www.jackbellgallery.com/artists/75-bambo-sibiya/overview/

Women appear less frequently in his work, although as his statement makes clear, he has great admiration for the matriarchal culture of rural South Africa, that is, for the women who hold things together after men have left to seek work in the cities.

Given the prevalence of male subjects in Sibiya’s work, it is understandable that one might assume that the seated figure is a man, and interpret what I see as facial shadows as a beard and mustache. The man-spreading, swelling pose reinforces that interpretation, and without question the gender of the figure is ambiguous.  However, her dress is that of an elderly female, and I believe that Sibiya wished the woman’s pose and masculine features to convey authority. Traditional gender roles are scrambled in an economy that removes men from their position of traditional patriarchal authority.

As the description reads, the woman, isolated at home, is “deep in thought about what will be the outcome of this time.” In that respect, she represents all of us, as well as the content of most news reports. We do not know what returning to ‘normal’ will look like. But the woman’s visage does not appear anxious; rather she is resolute, prepared to face whatever eventuates. Her fortitude is exemplary. As in the majority of Sibiya’s portraits, the figure gazes at us directly, engaging us and requiring us to respond. The parallel with Zanela Muholi’s portraits of LGBTI individuals is unmistakable: in both artist’s works, the sitter is self-possessed, confident of her identity despite the fact that it counters socially-accepted definitions. (Salley 2012). We do not know who this woman is—she is not named—but it is her confidence in who she is and what she represents that will help ensure her survival.   Nonetheless, life is precarious; the matriarch is on a pedestal, as behooves her status in her community, but it is unstable, unrooted to the ground.

Sue Williamson/ Annie Silinga  (1983)
Photoetching/screenprint collage
“A Few South Africans” series (Tale Gallery)

As Mark Auslander has observed, the image also brings to mind Resistance Art from the Apartheid era. Surely, the courage shown by activists at that time is a model for the fortitude, even self-sacrifice, required today.  Sue Williamson’s classic survey Resistance Art in South Africa (1989/2004) includes reproductions of her own series of screen prints honoring women activists, "A Few South Africans (1982-85)." Among those memorable portraits is “Annie Silinga”. Silinga (1910-84) was a leader in the 1956 anti-pass Women’s March to the Union Buildings in Pretoria. Standing in front of the fortress-like buildings, they sang “wathint’ abafazi,” [when] you strike the women, you strike a rock.” She was a defendant in the 1956 Treason Trial. After her death, her grave went unmarked until Williamson added a plaque bearing her battle cry, ”I will never carry a pass!”

In Williamson’s art work, Silinga’s immovable pose strongly parallels that of Bambo’s matriarch. Sibiya’s matriarch is looking toward the future, but she carries with her the legacy of an activist past.
 

Bambo Sibiya
Wait in Anticipation to See the Future
2020

Ellen Schattschneider: Although the artist references this indomitable figure as female, the sitter's gender does appears fluid, with, to my eye, a shadow of beard and mustache on the face. Whether intended or not, we sense a cross-dressed figure evoking the ambiguous gendered conditions of the Lockdown.

The vertical parallel lines framing the seated subject emphasize the domestic virtual prison South Africans are confined to for the duration. Sequestered "behind bars," within domestic spaces for an indefinite period, lines between conventional masculinity and femininity increasingly blur: what is a man if he cannot freely venture out into the public realm? All residents of the house assume, in significant respects, a female subject position, oriented primarily to the interior domestic world. To some extent the title. "Wait in anticipation to see the future," may refer to the future of gender roles and relations in post-Lockdown South Africa; will the nature of masculinity, or femininity, ever really be the same?

As the figure (female, male, or somewhere in between) journeys in this newly gendered space, she/he/they seems to time travel through the history of European female portraiture. The hand raised to the chin suggests the contemplative gesture in such works as  William Hogarth's Sigismunda Mourning over the Heart of Guiscardo; George de La Tour's Magdalene with Smoking Flame; Pablo Picasso's Woman with a Book, or, most recently Amy Sherald's official portrait of Michelle  Obama.  (The artist may be slyly riffing on Kehinde Wiley's work, repositioning persons of color within the history of European painting).  Sibiya's extensive use of lace, a semi-transparent medium favored by Goya, may suggest the depth of the portrayed subject--as each layer hints at other meanings below, only partially glimpsed through the elaborately worked fabric. 

Source; Wikipedia

Mark Auslander: The striking visual parallels that Pam highlights between Sue Williamson's 1983 photoetching/screenprint of anti-apartheid campaigner Annie Silinga and Bambo Sibiya's 2020 painting emerge out of an intertwined aesthetic and political history of the liberation struggle in South Africa. From the early days of the South African Native National Congress, the forerunner of the African National Congress, women were at the forefront of the struggle against racial oppression, in urban and rural settings (Ginwala 1990).  These 'mothers of the nation" are now, as in the past, foundational to the society's collective resilience at this moment of existential crisis.

Allusions to Mother Africa and the spirit of pan-Africanism, also seem to organize the work's composition, in a way that differentiates it from Sue Williamson's classic 1983 print of nnie Silinga.  In Sibiya's painting, the shape described by the lower white shawl and upper shrug textile describes, so far as I can tell, the outer boundaries of the map of the southern half of the African continent, more or less corresponding to the interconnected nations of the SADC region.  The lowest left portion of the white lace shawl has a protuberance corresponding to South Africa's West Coast Peninsula, north of Cape Town, jutting into the Atlantic. On the right side of the shawl, another rounded shape, in turn, corresponds to Mozambique's bulge into the Indian Ocean. The outer flare on the right of the female head-tie might even signal, in a distorted form, Somalia's pointed extension, the easternmost edge of the Horn of Africa.

The five dark circular blotches along the shawl's bottom "coastline," I suggest, summon up the spectacle of the novel coronavirus making landfall on the African continent, imperiling all those who dwell on the mother continent. Perhaps the sitter's bandaged right wrist and elbow hint at obscured wounds to the body politic. (To my anxious eyes, at least, even the floral motifs in the lace panel behind the figure recall the ominous shape of the virus).

As Pam notes, the figure rest precariously seated on a narrow raised platform, lacking conventional foundations or secure walls.  Only time will tell, the artist implies, if the Lockdown and social distancing will be sufficient to repel the invading force, now landing in force on the beaches.  For the moment, all those confined to quarters must simply wait, as the fate of the entire subcontinent, and the world, hangs in the balance.

References

 Ginwala, Frene. 1990. Women and the African National Congress 1912-1943. Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity

No. 8 (1990), pp. 77-93

Salley, Rael Jero . 2012.  “Zanele Muholi’s Elements of Survival,” African Arts 45/4 winter. 58-69)

Williamson, Susan, 1990. Resistance Art in South Africa. David Phillip.

• More information on the auction is on the Aspire site.