Re-form XI: Lehlogonolo Mashaba

Lehlogonolo Mashaba
Re-form XI
Video: time lapse recording the creation by the arist of a drawing, with choral music

2020

See video here (1:18)

Overview: Part of the University of Johannesburg's interdisciplinary Pandemic Project. A short time lapse video of artist  Lehlogonolo Mashaba creating a drawing of a semi transparent multi colored figure, accompanied by the UJ Choir's arrangement of the traditional song Kgore in seTswana, a song of greeting to a king.  The realized image is a human figure, probably male, facing front, with arms held  loosely to side, visible from thighs to head.

Geometric shapes are visible within the figure, and are lightly repeated in the surrounding field.  The face is slightly distorted, with cubist elements, and the upper reaches of the head have crystalline qualities pointed up, culminating in an upper spike. Bristling lines emenate from the figure's shoulders and other appendages.


Artist's Statement:  Re-form XI, looks at the mysteries and complexities surrounding the origins, and ultimately the meaning, of life.

Mashaba takes a closer look at the cycle of life during the pandemic, at the uncertainties of things beyond our understanding, and experiences an appreciation of the essence of life itself. His work addresses the idea of duality and the need for polarities to coexist simultaneously. At a time when we will be tested the most, Mashaba sees this idea of end and beginning, of push and pull, to be a highly potent topic.

Re-form XI consists of a lone figure that fades and distorts itself over a period of time, taking the shape of a translucent human form. Mashaba’s work takes inspiration from nature, geography and biology as well as giving the human figure an element of technological augmentation. The mark making depicts traces of mystical energies, of fragmented bodies in a state of integration or disintegration in non-objective form.

Kgore is a Setswana greeting song to a king. The villagers are looking forward to sunrise to go greet the king, so they call on the morning bird to summon the morning in order for them to go greet the king. Kgore mpuelele ho ye, ke bitsa phakela Ke fithle ke re Kgosi dumela ihele! Ah hele! Utlwang kwa lesunyaneng Trasnlation: Morning bird, speak on my behalf, I call morning! So I can go and greet the king! Listen and hear the birds call from the mountains!

Pamela Allara:  Like many of  Lehogonolo Mashaba’s works, the drawing Re-form XI presents us with a solitary standing figure, recognizably human but at the same time alien. At first it may seem like a creature from another planet, but upon inspection it appears to be instead a depiction not of a physical body, but rather of the external and internal forces that constantly form and re-form it. So numerous are these sharp angular elements that invade and explode from the figure, that the body and especially the head seem to be rapidly transforming into a robot controlled by electronic impulses, its warm red flesh tones yielding to the metallic blue of a manufactured object. However, for Mashaba, the active marks are indicative of not just of technological but of mystical energies. This isolated figure ironically is evidence that we are not separate individuals, but are the products of biological and cultural processes that constantly re-shape and re-form how we perceive ourselves over time. The diagrammatic shapes spinning off from the figure suggest that Mashaba considers digital technologies to be the most powerful forces reconfiguring our concept of the human at present, but the beautiful Tswana song that plays in the video of Mashaba creating the drawing leaves room for the spiritual. In the time of pandemic, we all feel threatened by forces beyond our control, which will have lingering effects on our personal and collective identities once it passes. Mashaba confronts us with these unknown, inevitable and uncontrollable changes and asks them to face them now.

Mark Auslander:  "Re-form XI" may be approached both as a still image, or as the time lapse video work of the same title, showing Mashaba creating the drawing on paper, as the recorded UJ Choir performance of the Tswana traditional song "Kgore" plays in the background.  Like many of Mashaba's work, this figure is semi transparent, partly dissolving or extending into the background, a visual manifestation of the artist's commitment to principles of deep interconnectedness, sometimes termed "Ubuntu," in which persons exist not as discrete, individuated islands, but in dynamic sociala and spiritual reciprocal connections to other persons.

The image would seem to be inspired  in part by the fantasy figure of Groot, a sentient tree-like superhero creature,  celebrated in the Guardians of the Galaxy film. (The figure in comic book form dates back to 1960).  The arboreal imagery may be significant in light of the profound importance of trees in the cosmology of both Sotho-Tswana and Nguni peoples in southern Africa, as active intermediaries with the life-giving ancestral shades. Trees, sources of healing medicines, are understood at times to be dwelling spaces of the shades, or as dynamic switchpoints between the linked domains of the Living and the Dead.  As Jean Comaroff notes in Body of Power (1985:89), wild trees in Tswana ritual sensibility concentrate the diffuse powers of the bush, on  overlapping frontiers between human settlements and distant spiritual realms, and medicines created from trea barks and roots direct these potent invisible forces into proximate human bodies and mortal projects, especially at times of existential crisis.   At our moment of viral plague, the artist may find it especially appropriate to invoke a tree like guardian figure to help heal imperiled humanity.

This symbolism may resonate with the artist's choice to have the Tswana traditional song Kgore, through which community members greet their sovereign, play in the background as this image is created before us in the video. Historically, the Batswana Kgosi (chief or king) is the prime mediator with the invisible realm of ancestors, bringing life giving rain and reproducing and disseminating the equilibrium of varied potent forces into the human-made realm.

The beautiful song, appealing to the morning bird for aid in bringing the dawn that will allow the royal subjects to awaken and greet their guardian sovereign, is thus a most fitting musical frame for the artist's calling into being of this striking figure, as if a guardian tree is growing in front of our eyes. The people, through singing, merge with the bird that heralds the  coming of light, calling into being each morning the intervening presence of the sovereign, who like this translucent, enigmatic figure helps bring light and hope into our troubled human world.