"19": Khosi Kunene

Khosi Kunene
"19"
Fine liner on paper
TLC Student Collection (South Africa, 2020)

Overvew:  Out a curved leafless tree, with branc- like arms, a large skull emerges in profile. In the cranium's rear, a brain is partially visible.

Artist's Statement;

From nature we are given
From nature we are taken
We think twice about what they say a pandemic is
We grow more and
More conscious everyday
We stay indoors to know ourselves more
Protect ourselves more
As we patiently wait to flower empty spaces.


Pam Allara;   This is an image of death-- both of humans and of nature. The tree, whose trunk has shrunk almost to a stump, appears to have produced knots in the form of coronavirus cells; its branches’ extended gestures appear each to be enclosing that deadly form as well. Ironically, the curving form of the tree appears to be dancing, a dance, one can only assume, of death.  From that sickened natural source springs a large, weighty skull. Its imposing, stark appearance dispels all hope that anything living can come forth from nature during a global pandemic. But nonetheless the skull’s brain is exposed, and it has not shriveled, as it would have were it truly dead. Perhaps this is what the artist is referring to when she says that “we patiently wait to flower empty spaces.” Somehow life can be sustained when surrounded, indeed enclosed, by death, and can manage to imagine a future when natural and human life flowers.


Mark Auslander: A number of the TLC featured artists--including William Kentridge.  Ramarutha Makoba, and  Sue Martin--have been drawn to arboreal imagery in contemplating the impact of the novel coronavirus. Trees offer visions of longevity, regeneration, healing, and in indigenous Southern African contexts, intimate traffic with ancestral shades and the life-giving forces of the invisible world. In Khosi Kunene's "19," the skull-topped tree may recall the Danse Macabre of early modern European art, a reminder at times of plague of the precariousness of life and the omnipresence of Death.  The curving tree with outstretched arm like branch is a disturbing yet compelling dance partner, evocative perhaps of the iconic final scene in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, in which Death himself leads his victims in the Totentanz, the Dance of Death, across a distant hillside.

At the same time, the visible presence within the cranium of a living brain suggests that this is not an entirely lifeless tree, but that mind and consciousness continue to evolve, even amidst the spectacle of mass death. The contours of the skull seem to signal the interior confinement forced by Lockdown, which encourages interior journeys of self discovery.  In her accompanying poem, the artist suggests that the winter hibernation of the Tree of Life is only temporary, and that out of the contemplation and despair of the Lockdown era, the empty spaces in our minds (left in part by mourning) will be repopulated by new foliage--expressions, one might venture to say, of the artistic and cultural creativity of the young generation that is coming of age at this strange moment.