TLC Student Collection Essays

Essays on the TLC Student Collection, by Pamela Allara and Mark Auslander

I. The TLC Student Collection: Overview

Pamela Allara

10 July 2020

Keneiloe-Mpho Mazibuko
“Comfort in Poverty, A Cinderella Story”

The Lockdown Collection’s third group, the Student Collection, was launched on June 23. Like its two predecessors, The Lockdown Collection and the Extension Collection, it consisted of 21 works of art that were posted consecutively. Unlike the previous unique works, however, the student works will be reproduced in a series of 10 limited edition prints each, which will be sold for modest prices. They will be reinterpreted as fine art prints later in the year. Proceeds from the sales will go to the Vulnerable Visual Artists Fund as well as to the student artist themselves, most of whom are studying either at Artist Proof Studio or at the University of Johannesburg.

The twenty-one artworks are evidence once again that South Africa is blessed with tremendous reserves of creative talent. “Student work” usually implies work that is hesitant, awkward, or not fully mature. The work here is assured, highly-competent, and moreover manages to avoid clichés. In addressing the pandemic, the themes of isolation and anxiety persist, as does that of courage and persistence. The motifs used to express those themes include, appropriately enough, single, isolated figures, often women. Keneiloe-Mpho Mazibuko’s mixed-media “Comfort in Poverty, A Cinderella Story” with an isolated mother lovingly binding her child to her, is a moving depiction of resilience.

 Somewhat unexpectedly, two works in the collection express the theme of isolation and loss through architecture. In “Ghost of the Ordinary,” by Kerry-Leigh Cawrse (BFA candidate, University of Johannesburg), abandoned, crumbling structures loom over the viewer: veritable towers of absence. On the other hand, in “Thresholds,” by Shalom Mushwana (BVA candidate, University of Johannesburg), the two-dimensional abstracted architectural shapes visually prevent our entrance, as we may not visit friends’ spaces during the lockdown.

Monwabisi Boyi
Claws of Contagious

Surprisingly, the coronavirus itself appears in relatively few works, but it makes a frightening appearance in Monwabisi  Boyi’s mixed-media “Claw of Contagious,” where multiple viruses surround an uprais\ed hand covered in a less-than-protective mask, a reminder that the virus can be spread through touch as well as breath. Our inability to touch each other, to comfort each other as Mazibuko’s mother does her child, is one of the most emotionally painful results of the pandemic.

The likely source of the pandemic, the pangolin mammal, surfaces in the Student collection for the first time since its appearance in Thabiso Mohlakoana’s “Ardmore Pangolin Ceramic bowl” and Diane Victor’s smoke drawing “Eating One’s Own Tail--Pangolin” in the initial TLC. The clay and wax ‘vase,’ “Pandora’s Pandemic,,” by Jackie Naidoo (visual art student, University of Johannesburg) has a torso-like shape that is surrounded by pangolins, as well as the gruesome visages of the pandemic’s victims. The infected mammal has unleashed a Pandora’s box of life-threatening illness.

Another motif we might expect to see is that of the essential front-line worker. Thabo Skhosana (a graduate of Artist Proof Studio) avoids the single, heroic portrait that can be found in the initial TLC collection, and instead reminds us that addressing the pandemic requires the efforts of people from all walks of life. His watercolor, “The War Against the Invisible Enemy” includes a member of the military and the police in addition to a nurse, all of whom charge downhill together to battle the pandemic, each person a warrior in a collective army.

One would think that given the breadth of the first two collections, there would be little new left for young artists to say. But the artworks in the Student collection are truly individual interpretations of and imaginative responses to the coronavirus pandemic.  They should provide inspiration to the artists who will submit work to the following Open Call.


II. “The Thing with Feathers:”  Across Shadows and Light in The TLC Student Collection
Mark Auslander

10 July 2020

While grappling with themes brought to the fore by over forty established artists showcased in the initial run of The Lockdown Collection (TLC) and the TLC Extension Collection, the twenty-one younger artists of the Student Collection strike out, in important ways, into new, unexplored territories.

Interior Landscapes: Locked within One’s Mind

Shalom Mushwana
Thresholds

The challenges of social isolation, giving birth to endless rounds of disquieting internal dialogue, are prominent in many of these works. Shalom Mushwana's Thresholds interrogates the wall and door of the artist’s room, to which he has been largely confined for much of the Lockdown. He plays a kind of game with himself,  writing the word “value,” repetitively across the wall. His mind explores the play on words; where precisely rests economic value in our current moment of crisis, when we can buy and sell so little, and what values guide us as we pursue our lives under these radically constrained circumstances?  The chamber becomes a metaphor for the artist’s own interior mental state under Lockdown, as his thoughts return again and again to the same basic puzzle, from which there seems to be no obvious exit.

Cinthia Sifa Binene
Être Femme (To be a Woman)

A rather different room is envisioned in Cinthia Sifa Binene’s “Etre Femme” (To be a Woman).  Her mind returns to the small dwelling space she and her family occupied when she first arrived as a child in South Africa for DRC, where she began to decode gender and sexuality through images glimpsed on television. Two women gaze into mirrors, pondering the nature of beauty, desire, race, and self-worth under conditions of racial and gendered hierarchy. A lighter skinned woman, in a 19th century Belle Epoque bustle dress, contemplates her visage (reflected back with what seem to be more African features)  in a dresser under the watchful eye of a male portrait bust, perhaps evocative of the ever present patriarchal gaze  A much darker skinned woman contemplates herself in a hand mirror; she may be more comfortable in her own blackness, but the imposed image of a cow on her midriff perhaps signals that as a woman she remains confined by a system that still often reckons female worth in terms of lobola marriage payments. Whatever the precise meanings at play, the work highlights the internal psychic drama and self questioning that unfold under Lockdown conditions, as we go traveling within the palace of our memories.

Lungile Mbelle
Conversations with Myself

Lungile Mbelle’s Conversations with Myself, in turn, highlights the painful, even anguished interior mindscapes of the crisis. Two disembodied self-portrait heads of the artist face one another. The left head has eyes blinded by newspaper reports and seems to scream; the right one has open eyes but refrains from speech. All of us long for the life-affirming joys of exchange and reciprocity with others, which are so highly restricted under Lockdown, but the loss of such mutuality is especially painful for young adults, who largely come to figure out in their teens and twenties who they are  through the constant traffic of social interaction with peers. Pictographs of sun and moon, which under other circumstances would evoke complementary interdependence, hover around Mbelle’s two heads, as if to remind us how difficult psychic integration is to achieve under conditions of confinement, when we can give and receive so little to and from other persons.

Ralarno Coutts
Untitled

Ralarno Coutts’ Untitled, in turn, shows a youthful figure pursuing the solitary pleasures of drinking and smoking, now largely prohibited to the great majority under governmental restrictions. A 4th year student at UJ, much of his work engages with issues of “invisible identity” in reference to his own mixed race or “Coloured community.”  As in this work, he tends to blur or obscure the faces of those who act in a stereotyped manner.  During the pandemic and Lockdown, so much energy and thought must be directed in low income households, to attaining the material essentials of survival that even zoning out has become a scarce resource. 

The travels of the confined mind are chronicled in quite different register in Jesse Shepstone’s artist’s book “As many as cars.” While stuck at home, the artist photographs 500 cars speeding by (ostensibly on essential errands, although one suspects this is often not the case!)  Automobiles are endlessly evocative“vehicles” of memory, summoning up reminiscences of times past and paths not taken. This collection of cars whizzing by. taken from the vantage point of confinement, thus takes us on a kind of journey through the artist’s own mind, darting hither and fro, highlighting the contrast between the physical reality of stasis and the mind’s endless capacity to heed the siren song of the open road.

Kerry-Leigh Cawrse
Ghost of the Ordinary

This dialectic between the internal and external landscapes of isolation and desire is further explored in Kerry-Leigh Cawrse’s “Ghost of the Ordinary;” The artist photographs abandoned houses in stark black and white, spaces haunted by those who once dwelled in them, silent monuments to a lost world of social proximity. Each of the three images is centered on prominent diagonal forms, a shadow in the left, and jutting beams in the center and right frames. One senses the distant traces of an arm held out, seeking another, alas without any hope of a reciprocated gesture of acknowledgement. Cowrie’s ghosts, one suspects, are not only the former inhabitants of these decaying structures, but the specters of our recent selves, who hold the body memories of touch and closeness which now must discipline ourselves every day to avoid. It is up to all of us to rebuild a new social world on the ruins of the old, balancing the need for health with the imperatives of retaining and refashioning that which makes us human.

Michael Vickers
Internalized: Wilderness Series

In a comparable vein, Michael Vickers’s “internalized: Wilderness Series,” presents the Lockdown period as a liminal space, betwixt and between conventional times and places. Like the Israelites wandering in the desert for 40 years, we are being remade through this passage, in ways we cannot yet fully imagine or understand, Vickers’ landscape may evoke the No Man’s Lands of World War One, muddied fields of death and desperation between trenches. Yet from this darkened wild land, an evident projection of the artist’s own mind, emerge outlined self-portraits of the artist, one gazing skyward. We do not quite know what awaits, but we have seen, or are just about to see, the Promised Land.

A different internal mental journey through our strange time is presented in Thulani Gancka’s Dark or Blue. A pensive woman makes her way through a cityscape that seems to be the projection of her own interior thoughts. We see the in the middle foreground foliage and a township and the background the skyline of central Johannesburg, a site of dreams for so many millions. Here an interesting parallel to Vickers: the Hillbrow Tower, symbol of the city, which seems to touch the sky. Like Vicker’s upturned head etched in the sky the spire evokes the subject’s longing for the Infinite, unconstrained by current circumstances here on the ground we trod.

Gancka’s dignified woman may be pregnant, mindful of the challenges faced by the life yet to come during this time of unparalleled biological and medical crisis. To her left we see a strange floating shape perhaps evocative of dividing cells within the womb, or the replicating spread of the viral pathogen.  Our overall impression is of quiet determination, as she makes her way within the looming metropolis, ready to face whatever dangers lie ahed.

Keneiloe-Mpho Mazibuko’s “Comfort in Poverty: A Cinderella Story,” also presents a woman of color, now tenderly holding her infant child, with whom she exchanges a loving glance. There may be traces of the classic motif of Madonna and Child, for this is certainly a time when millions are being told there is no room at the inn. Under Lockdown, for some unfathomable reason, children are prohibited from being brought into township stories, posing impossible burdens on impoverished parents and caregivers. Even a few precious moments outdoors, which every parent and child should be allowed to cherish, is forbidden. Mother and child are bound together by bright cloth and their shared gaze, but even those bonds might be sundered at any moment: they are in that sense evocative of the entire predicament of the South African poor, whose basic connections with one another tremble on the brink.

An alternate, rather comic view of the isolation of our moment is presented in  Rhengu Keith Maluleke’s “On It,” A young masked woman, clothed only in the papers of a school science and technology textbook, sits demurely on a toilet. Her hair is wrapped in curlers made of toilet tissue rolls, a scarce commodity under the present supply chain blockages. Presumably, the textbook pages provides alternate means of self cleaning under these difficult circumstances.  (The title might playfully suggest as well the improvisational ingenuity called for at the current challenging moment: “I’m on it.” ) The image can certainly be read as voyeuristic, which may be precisely the point: during Lockdown, when social interaction is so limited, one’s primary companions may well be those fantasized about in private (especially, it would appear, when on the privy!)

Frans Thoka
Malapa Ga A Lekane

Toilet paper also features in a more desperate vision of the current situation, in Frans Thoka’s “Malapa Ga A Lekane” (sePedi: Families are not of equal status). On a prison blanket, redolent of the precarious conditions of confinement during Lockdown, the title phase is written on a chalkboard, in front of a toilet paper roll mounted like a trophy, a critique of those who selfishly hoard such an essential commodity during hard times.

Another folded-in vision of separation and anxiety confronts us in Monwabisi Boyi’s The Claw of Contagious. A large hand, which we are so often admonished is a dangerous vector of contagion, is wearing a mask, which in principle should offer protection, although the dangers of the lurking virus fill the entire visual field. Our own hand,  which ought to be our instrument of joyous, productive self-extension into the world, is now turned against us during the crisis, becoming a claw that confronts us. We see no trace of a face, no promise of kindness, only signs of prohibition: no drinking, no smoking.  Our own hand is masked, but how can we protect ourselves from our own limb? We are truly on our own.

Angelique Bougaard
 Covid Warrior.

A rather different, solitary hand is explored in Angelique Bougaard’s graceful Covid Warrior.  A sculpted left hand, made of soap and blood, lightly touches the handle of a metal pail, filled with water. We are reminded of the millions who lack indoor plumbing and access to soap and clean water, the frontline defenses against the novel coronavirus. The work celebrates the uncompensated labor of millions of African women, who carry water and perform so many other vital households for the domestic tasks, often under conditions of great risk and isolation, all of which have been exponentially increased by the pandemic. Bougaard beautifully evokes the aesthetics of everyday life in townships and rural areas, in which even the basic tasks of lifting or setting down a bucket of life-giving water are infused with a deep sense of restrained balance and the cultural principles of respect, caring, and dignity.  Her ethereal hand arcs over the precious pail of life-sustaining water, almost as if blessing it, or distilling its liquid essence into translucent form. In a land of great suffering, nobility of spirit endures, and unsung women laborers and worshipers continue to quench the parched bodies and souls of those in need.

Clement Mohale
Unprecedented Times

Perhaps the collection’s most heart-wrenching image of isolation is Clement Mohale’s Unprecedented Times. An emaciated young woman offers a capsule or pill to a man whose swollen spiked green head is that of the feared coronavirus. She may be proposing a cure or seeking to propitiate the faceless monster who does not return her gaze. Behind her looks on another male figure, whose head is a locked safe, a reminder of the implacable Lockdown. In the distance, we see the back of men, whose path is blocked by a sign warning of Covid-19.  Once again, the most basic foundations of social life, the exchange of looks and of kindness, are closed off to the subject, who bravely puts out a hand to an alien being, knowing that her gesture may never be reciprocated.

Moving Up, Moving On

None of these 21 artists entirely give into despair. Many exhibit a quiet optimism, even a sense of humor, infused with a sober awareness of the stony road ahead. Jason Langa’s Umbila, like  Thulani Gancka’s Dark or Blue, shows a solitary woman, albeit one who is broadly smiling, refusing to be beaten down by the crisis. Although the title evokes the produce (“mealies” or maize) which she ordinarily hawks in the Central Business District or the township, the metal bowl on her head is now filled with the essential commodities of our viral era, disinfectants, gloves, masks,and toilet paper. The resilience shown by African women on the Rand for well over a century, make their improvisatory way through the city, is proudly celebrated.

Khosi Kunene’s “19” directly confronts the current landscape of mass loss, referenced by an enormous skull emerging out of winding tree, free of foliage, with branches figured as outstretched arms. The uncanny shapes evokes the early modern Danse Macabre, reminder of the omnipresence of Death at times of plague. Yet, in the sprit of William Kentridge’s Shadow Procession and More Sweetly Plays the Dance, this is not a choreography only of suffering, but one filled with joy and energy, moving forward against all odds. The capacious skull is open at the back, showing a vibrant, active brain.  Here we see a young mind at play, waiting, as the artist writes in her accompanying poem, to help fill in the empty spaces of present time with the flowers of our imagination.

Samukelo Gqola
Culture Respecting President

Another  forward-facing procession is presented powerfully in Samukelo Gqola’s
Culture Respecting President. The struggle against Covid-19 is cast in terms of a Xhosa male initiation camp. Elders wearing masks escort two initiates, who are depicted as potent birds of prey, who brandish fighting sticks adorned with face masks. Perhaps the birds are far-seeing bateleur eagles (isiXhosa:  ingqanga), which can at time prophesies disaster and calamity, and which are famously celebrated as the stone birds of Great Zimbabwe.  “Culture” in this vision, encapsulated by initiation, becomes a vital partner in the national effort against the pandemic. As in Michael Vickers’ Wilderness Series, the current crisis is presented as a liminal zone, a place out of normal space and time, through which the initiates, like all of us, will emerge transformed, returning to the regular world, where everything is the same, and yet where everything is somehow different.

Optimism and wordplay also informs Tebogo Stephen Langa’s “We Went Viral”. A young man wearing a mask is seen in profile. Under the masked mouth we read a handwritten message, “We went viral around the world.”   South African artists, through the TLC and other projects, have spread their message internationally, going ‘viral’ in the positive sense.  The artist’s mouth may be obscured by the mask, but his words are still widely broadcast.

Tusevo Landu
Covid-19 Olympics

Tusevo Landu’s Covid-19 Olympics, in turn, wryly portrays the global struggle against Covid-19 , including the rivalrous struggle for a vaccine, as an Olympic competition. Within the familiar five rings of the Olympic banner, we hold various scenes from the global crisis, including lists of dreadful statistics, injunctions to behave safely, and a young person’s body being wrapped in a body bag.  A snarling hyena seems to be a stand in for the disease, into which a syringe, perhaps containing the hoped for vaccine, is being injected. Presiding over the scene is a Kongo nkisi nkondi, a nail-studded power figure use in Central Africa ritual systems to enforce oath and promote righteous behavior, backed by the power of the ancestors themselves. The nkisi declares, both humorously and seriously (perhaps channeling Mr. T from the A Team) “Wear your mask, fool!”

Thabo Skhosana
War against the invisible enemy

A less jaundiced view of collective unity is presented in Thabo Skhosana’s “War against the invisible enemy". Drawing on the aesthetics of manga and anime, the artist presents the entire nation in a united front,  an army led by a young woman medical workers, flanked by an armored South African Police officer, a machine gun toting infantryman, and others, bravely traversing the fog of battle. As in the Avengers and other superhero dramas, the protagonists are melded in a virtual family, bound indissolubly to one another.

Cynics might note that the image is rather a fantasy. The actual experience of the pandemic and of the Lockdown, as so many of these artists have noted, is hardly co-equal for the great majority of South African impoverished communities of color, whose already marginal life struggles are rendered even more precarious by disease, hunger, and legal restrictions.  The police are more often experienced by the urban and rural power as agents of oppression, capriciously imposing Lockdown regulations on the less privileged. Yet this is nonetheless a delightful, exuberant fantasy that should be valued on its own terms: as for so many of the young artists, the Lockdown has given Skhosana’s mind a chance to revel in imagination, summoning up not simply the world as it is, but, through art, a world as it ought to be.

Jackie Naidoo
Pandora's Pandemic

Finally, I am captivated by Jackie Naidoo’s Pandora’s Pandemic, a modern rendition of the classical legend of Pandora’s Box. The structure is surrounded by pangolins, anomalous scaled mammals that are honored as vessels of divinity in many indigenous African societies.  As has been widely reported, pangolins may have served as transitional repositories for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, as it jumped. probably from bats, to its human hosts, picking up sequences of RNA that now help hijack human cells as the virus proliferates. The most trafficked mammals on the planet, pangolins are poignant reminders of the long legacy of environmental abuse, including deforestation and human intrusion into previously wild reserves, that may have released waves of viral contagion across species.

Pandora’s all too human curiousity, the legend remind us, launched all manner of horrors and plagues upon humankind. But one most important element remained within the box, hope itself, that which sustains us in our darkest hour. Naidoo’s compelling ceramic work glows from within, redolent both of the terrifying forge of the pandemic, but also of the inextinguishable flame of hope in our time of trial.  Gazing into her enigmatic column of energy, I find myself thinking of Emily Dickinson’s beloved lines,

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

The TLC project was initiated on the evening the Lockdown began with William Kentridge’s founding gift, a flowering tree that posed the vital question of our era, “Where shall we place our hope?” This is perhaps the oldest of human interrogatives, hearkening back to the 121st psalm, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.”  Our eyes lift up, but will succor ever come?  Where shall we place our hope? Now, through the pens, brushes, hands, camera lenses, and digital magic of these 21 remarkable young artists, we have a answer to Kentridge’s challenge. We do indeed have somewhere to place our hope: in the young artists of this new generation, who, amidst great suffering and loss, sing an incessant tune of creativity and courage—calling, against the odds, a new and better world into being.