Covid-19 Olympics: Tusevo Landu

Tusevo Landu
Covid-19 Olympics
Charcoal mixed media on fabriano
TLC Student Collection (South Africa, 2020)

Overview: The five multi-colored  rings of the International Olympic Movement are arrayed over a grayish background filled with images of the novel coronavirus. Each ring contains figures or images evocative of the pandemic and lockdown, including a pointed hand ""Stay Home") a monstrous snarling beast being injected, huddled figures reading various pronouncements, and a figure clad in running shoes perhaps being wrapped in a body bag, The top center ring show Kongo power figurine or nkisi nkondi, into which nails have been ritually pounded. surrounded by statistics on worldwide cases and deaths from the pandemic. The figurine asks, "Where is your mask, fool?"

Artist's Statement: In this work, I express the impact of the Corona Virus in our lives, across the world, how the outbreak has become a global competition where nations are in search of the cure
or vaccine. I have used the Olympics symbol to globalise these concepts, to be more satirical about the year 2020. This year was supposed to be the year where the Olympics would take place, but we are witnessing the opposite. To me this seems so hilarious and pathetic because there are
people going through tremendous breakdowns during this lockdown; retrenchments are happening, mental illness playing a role as well, people have lost their loved ones and families are torn apart. What will happen post-pandemic?

Mark Auslander:  As John Macaloon (1984) notes in his study of the invention of the modern Olympic moment,  Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, sought to distinguish between "patriotism", love of one's country, and "nationalism,"  that is to say adversarial opposition, including viole ce, aimed at other nations and peoples. The Olympics would celebrate the former, through flags and anthems and uniforms, and defuse and defang the latter. The past century has hardly demonstrated the triumph of love over hatred in the international arena,  but de Coubertin's dream still exercises a powerful shared vision for those who believe in the possibility of a common human and humane world, as powerfully imaged in the famous logo of the interlocking rings of humanity.

The Covid-19 crisis has united humanity in the sense of facing a common danger, although it has hardly led to the levels of international cooperation and humanitarian solidarity De Coubertin and his fellow Durkheimians might have hoped for. In many societies, the pandemic has elicited xenophobic responses; this week, the current US administration, seeking to detract for its staggering public health failures, has taken the previously unthinkable step towards withdrawing the US from the World Health Organization. Landus's image of the delayed 2020 Olympics calls into sharp relief both the promise and the failures of the long-cherished dream of global solidarity, as we all wonder if there will be a coordinated response in the search for a vaccine, or if we are facing a biomedical war of all against all.

Allen Roberts suggests that the snarling beast in the lower right circle is a hyena, a widely apprehended witchcraft familiar in the region. Allen further notes that HIV/AIDS in East Africa was at times referred to as "hyena," Perhaps Landu similarly uses this feared creature as a stand in for Covid-19, which at the moment seems entirely untamable. Hence, the hand that advances with syringe towards the animal, holding one presumes the long wished-for vaccine, which would guarantee victory in this global competition.

I am especially intrigued by the nail-studded Kongo nkisi nkondi that presides over the work in the top center ring. Landu moved to South Africa in 2006 from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the nkisi presumably references his own national cultural heritage. Nails pounded into nkisi famously help to enforce oaths and underlying social values, so it is entirely appropriate that the figurine hear admonishes viewers to wear their masks and keep others safe. It is worth noting that nkisi are activated by medicinal substances, including grave soil, and in that sense may be conceived of as powerful mobile graves through which the powers of the Dead watch over and safeguard the living (MacGaffey. 1993). At this time of mass death and loss, we might read the nkisi as speaking on behalf of the Dead, to all of living humanity, exhorting us through the intertwined rings of the  International Olympic movement to heed, at long last, our better angels.

In a recent essay, Allen Roberts (2019) introduces the neologism "interformance" to characterize the performative labor established by and through the nailed nkisi nkondi figurines, which render "extravagantly visible" the vast matrix of invisible spiritual and social relations that converge within and radiate from these power objects,  binding all associated with this form to honor a common pledge. The irresistible spectacle of the nail power figure (an exemplary "technology of enchantment" in Alfred Gell's terms)  takes us into the "inter-", the very heart of things, even as they intensify the "-formance,"the coming into being of a network of previously diffuse intersubjective intentionalities. These objects and their ritual deployment are extreme examples of what Godfrey Lienhardt (1961) long ago termed "symbolic action," the externalization of interior emotional states that take on objective, binding reality in the external world.  Such would such seem to be the case with Landu's forceful nkisi, presiding over the Olympic banner, projecting out the plea to wear our masks to all of humanity, lest we lose all we hold dear.

References

Godfrey Lienhardt. 1961. The Control of Experience: Symbolic Action. Chapter 7 in Divinity and Experience : The Religion of the Dinka. Oxford University Press.

John J. MacAloon,  1984. This Great Symbol: Pierre de Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olympic Games. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wyatt MacGaffey. 1993  "The Eyes of Understanding," in Astonishment and Power: The Eyes of Understanding: Kongo Minkisi and The Art of Renee Stout. (Wyatt MacGaffey and Michael D. Harris Smithsonian. 

Roberts, Allen F. 2019. Interformances of a Kongo Nail Figure, in Striking Iron; The Art of African  Blacksmiths. University of Washington Press. 

Malapa Ga A Lekane: Frans Thoka

Frans Thoka
Malapa Ga A Lekane
Medium: Paint on prison blanket
TLC Student Collection (South Africa 2020)

Overview: On a small chalkboard hanging from a nail, surrounded by a garland of sorts, is written the title phrase "Malapa Ga A Lekane" (sePedi: Families are not of equal status)   A roll of toilet paper hangs on a holder. as it is a trophy. The background is a brown prison blanket, on which a shadow is cast.


Artist's Statement:  Lockdown is the awakening of humanity and realizing that malapa ga a lekane. From the beginning of the lockdown, selo started to matter. Batho ba bantši ga bana mano a go dira tšhelete ya go reka borotho; ga se gore ga ba kgone go nagana. Melapeng e mengwe toilet paper ya lešidi ke bothata. Rena re swanetše ke go thušana mola le mola. Ga se taba ya lockdown fela. Ke nagana gore ge reka tšwela pele ka Botho, reya kgole. Bao ba sa ememego gore maphelo a bona abe kaone, ke
nako ya gore re ithute; re botšiše bao ba kgonago gore ba kgona bjang go reka borotho.

(The artist requests that viewers research how to translate his statement from sePedi.

Mark Auslander:   The title phrase, "Malapa Ga A Lekane" (in sePedi) literally means that families are of different status. It may be used ironically or sarcastically to dismiss those who attempt presumptuously to rise above their station. In this instance, the artist seems to be calling, without irony, for sympathy and aid to those households that are financially on the edge, in need of significant assistance. The chalkboard might be the kind of object that would hang in a classroom (if classrooms were still open), sharing a vital message about economic inequality, revealed and compounded by the Covid-19 crisis.  The toilet tissue roll,  being held as a kind of trophy (like a taxidermy fish) emphasizes how terribly limited resources are being unfairly hoarded. The surrounding garland, perhaps of dried flowers, may be evocative of the legions of dead and dying in this tragic moment.

The surrounding brown background of the prison blanket may signal the fact that under Lockdown the whole nation, especially the impoverished black majority, is in a state of increasingly desperate confinement, a veritable prison. As was true under Apartheid, prisons in modern South Africa remain overwhelmingly associated with impoverishment and precarity; in that sense the low income majority, like the assemblage in the center of Thoka's image, clings to narrow islands as rising threats confront them on every side.

Unprecedented Times: Clement Mohale

Clement Mohale
Unprecedented Times
Mixed Media
(TLC Student Collection, South Africa, 2020)

Overview: A young woman in a blue blouse hold out her palm, bearing a large red and yellow  pill or capsule, to a a male figure, whose bent head is a greenish novel coronavirus. Behind her is another male figure, whose head is a locked safe with a combination lock. In the distance several figures walk through a sparse township street, facing a sign warning "Caution Danger of Covid-19."


Artist's Statement:  My artwork represents the unprecedented Covid-19 epidemic
which has left the world at a standstill. The work communicates the awareness and effects of the Coronavirus. These include the limitations of human movement due to the imposed lockdown regulations. Thus, the use of entangled lines in my work represents the impact of emotional, physical and spiritual wellbeing based on the changes on the normal daily routines. In a pandemic characterized by extreme uncertainty it is unclear as to when a vaccine will be made
available.

Pamela Allara: The three main figures in Mohale’s mixed media work together represent the risks, dangers and desperate hope of the populace during the coronavirus. At the left rear, the tall figure with the head of a safe personifies the lockdown. The safe is filled with fragments of bodies, exemplifying the lockdown’s resulting widespread claustrophobia. At the center is a thin, anxious woman, who holds a pill in her extended hand. Ignoring the lockdown, she has ventured outdoors to directly confront the virus, who inspects her offering. This confrontation is a scene of desperation. When one is seriously ill, one is willing to try anything that might offer a cure, or even some relief. The woman awaits the coronavirus’ verdict, as does society as a whole. 

David Coplan:  Is the corona-headed figure the virus or someone who has it? Is the pill a cure, and if so for whom? An offering or a question? And the box camera headed figure? Voyeuristic documentation of futility?

When days are dark, friends are few.

Mark Auslander: In "The Aesthetic Significance of the Face," sociologist Georg Simmel (1901) famously argues that the complexity of the human face, allowing for intricate mirroring and improvisational modification of the mirrored faces of our interlocutors, highlights the core dialectic of revelation and concealment that is at the heart of human social existence.  We are bound to one another through the mutual exchange of glances and facial expression, yet often deceived precisely by those exchanges. Hence,  Simmel suggests, the enormous importance in the history of art of the face, which while foregrounding the unity of the person, simultaneously summons up all we can know, and cannot know, of our fellow social beings.

Simmel's insights are helpful, I suggest, in unpacking Mohale's enigmatic scene. The invisible enemy of the virus is distinctly faceless, and the restrictions of the Lockdown greatly limit our conventional capacity to engage in face-to-face interaction with others.  We do not know if those whom we encounter in the course of our everyday lives are infectious hosts of the virus, and how risky any interaction with them might be. The general uncertainty of social life is thus enormously increased at this moment of trial.  The two figures who surrounds the young woman emphatically lack the vital feature, the face, through which we normally seek to assess other people's motivations and agendas: one with a large spiked virus head, and the other with the head of a locked safe, redolent of the Lockdown itself.

The young woman presents with an open palm an offered medicinal capsule, perhaps evocative of the hoped-for vaccine, to the monstrous virus-headed male figure, who seems to lower his head to inspect it. Lacking access to recognizable facial features, neither she, nor the viewer, has any way of assessing if the offered gift will be accepted or reciprocated. The looming figure behind her ,with the locked safe in the place of its head, is equally closed to her and to us.

In contrast to the dense heaviness of the foreground figures (drawn as the artist notes with entangled lines evocative of stasis and paralysis) the background scene is striking for its use of negative space. The regular energy, the buzz, the musicality of township life are all palpably absent. Two sparsely drawn male figures, wearing hats and casting long shadows, proceed along a path that is blocked by the sign warning of the disease. we see their backs, but their faces are lost to us as well.  We might see a market woman bearing wares on her head, but her face is distinctly in shadow. The only face we are able to behold is that of the plaintive young woman, avatar for Everyman and Everywoman during the Lockdown, bargaining for her life with a faceless being that emphatically refuses to reciprocate her gaze or extend a hand.  Such is the soul-crushing isolation and anxiety of our current moment.




References

Georg Simmel, “The Aesthetic Significance of the Face [1901

Women of Color on the Frontlines: Portraits of Unsung Heroes

This project is a response to the observation that female physicians of color are underrepresented in the art, media, and reporting around the country's response to the COVID-19 epidemic.

Overview
The goal of  Women of Color on the Frontlines: Portraits of Unsung Heroes is to challenge the narrative about who in this country is on the front lines of the fight against COVID 19 by honoring women of color physicians with portraits reflecting their determination, talent and tireless work.  The project works by having women of color physicians from around the country submit photos of themselves in the PPE they don each day and then recruiting local artists who transform these photos into art.  Each portrait is a powerful reminder of the sacrifices these women make daily to serve the communities in which they live and work

A career in medicine is not easy—for many reasons—yet these women choose it. Many of them form the frontline response to the epidemic but yet we do not see their faces in the news, on billboards, or in art honoring both the sacrifices and contributions they make as medical professionals. -Sarah E. Rowan, M.D.Infectious Diseases, Denver, CO


Sarah E. Rowan has created this profoundly important project which now has over 200 photos. I just downloaded over 100 portraits based on some of the photographs.Rowan herself is a physician and artist as well as a mother. She created some of the artworks.
 Here is the rainbow of the United States, we see it here.
 And these women are extraordinary: physicians, many of them mothers, some also artists. Their compelling gazes draw us in.

Dr. Kimberly Turner by Yana Greenstein

I wasn’t surprised when I realized that I had been present in the first four obstetrical cases of Coronavirus at my small, suburban hospital.  When the pandemic started, I knew I was uniquely positioned to handle extra clinical duties, if needed.  My children are almost adults and I have always loved being a busy clinician.  My partners joke about me having a 30-year-old stamina, although I recently turned 56 years old.  One of the many tragedies regarding the national story of Covid-19 is that this deadly virus is hitting populations of color with a vengeance.  I felt in my spirit that God was preparing me, a Black female obstetrical provider, for battle.

Each time my partners announce a new obstetrical case, I cringe while waiting to hear the name of the affected patient, praying that it is not another African American or Hispanic woman.  While performing telemedicine visits with these women, they shared their fears of death, of infecting their babies, and, of being alone for delivery.  They pleaded with me to be there at the moment of their child’s birth because I was the closest person to family they would possibly see.

The previously mentioned situation is not getting much press.  My face, yes, my skin color, is placing me at increased risk of acquiring Covid-19, not only because I am a middle-aged, hypertensive, African American woman, but also because I am an African American medical provider torn between increasing my presence in risky obstetrical situations and keeping myself “distanced” to stay healthy.  The indescribable pull that I feel while answering this new call to duty is stressful and dangerous. 

All patients deserve the best medical team consisting of the most qualified providers who can also provide them the best emotional support during their care. But, the story does not just end there.  All medical providers need to address their unconscious biases to be able to truly listen to these patients and give them what they need regardless of the provider’s race. For now, those of us called to answer this “call to duty” will continue to do our best to provide excellent, compassionate care so let’s listen and welcome the stories from these beautiful physician mothers and record them for our history books."

Kimberly Moran Turner, MD, FACOG is an obstetrician/gynecologist at Johns Hopkins Community Physicians in Columbia, MD.  Dr. Turner has been an attending physician in OB/GYN since 1995.  She is a regular contributor to the Hopkins clinical excellence magazine – CLOSLER (bringing physicians closer to the founder of medicine, William Osler).

 Anna Sabryna

Anna Sabryna By Yana Greenstein

Ruth Chacko

Ruth Chacko by Yana Greenstein

Tara Frederick Howard

 Tara Frederick Howard by Shelly Rowan

 Jacinta Cooper

Jacinta Cooper by Kavitha Ryali

 Jacinta Cooper by Priscilla Sarmiento-Gupana

Shelley RubenYoLo

Shelley RubenYoLo By Sarah Rowan

Susan Platt
These amazing women doctors are all vivid to see, in both the photographs and the paintings inspired by them. Their intense dedication to our ongoing crisis is invisible to the general public, who mainly see statistics and generalizations. Seeing the individual faces of doctors who are serving all over the country is a crucial project to remind us of the real heroes of our crisis. As the statistics on the numbers of people of color contracting and dying from COVID-19 and as the health crisis continues to escalate, these women are dealing with a long term challenge to themselves, their families, and their professions. As so many in this country cavalierly declare that face masks are not necessary and social distancing is so often ignored, the people who are paying for this arrogance are the women we see here. The stay at home orders cannot apply to the people of color who are serving on the front lines.

Nora Vasquez

by Yana Greenstein

Maria A Parekh

Maria A Parekh by Mark Shelton

Melanie Hafford

 Melanie Hafford by Yana Greenstein

The website includes over one hundred women doctors of color and still counting. I will present a few more here. I feel that simply looking at their faces is so moving that little commentary is necessary. 

 by Sarah Rowan

Oluwatomilola Nwoke

 Aparna Raj Parikh by Yana Greenstein

Aparna Raj Parikh

Cristina Ferrari by Sam Eddington

 Cristina Ferrari by Sam Eddington

Madhavi Ryali by Kavitha Ryali

Vidya Mandiyan by Kavitha Ryali

Vidya Mandiyan 

Aditi Chhada by Issis Kelly

Aditi Chhada 

Sherie Khambatta

Sherie Khambatta by Nancy Pendergast

Dr. Arlanna Moshfeghi 

Dr. Arlanna Moshfeghi by Jillian Muntz

Dr. Kathleen Mangunay Pergament by Nancy Prendergast

Dr. Kathleen Mangunay Pergament by Nancy Prendergast

Jyoti Rau 

 Jyoti Rau by Kavitha Ryali

Ravneet Gil

99. Ravneet Gill by Holly McClelland

Mark Auslander: The New York Times reports on a comparable project in New York City, by  Ms. Ava Brown

She terms this the Essential Worker project:  http://ayabrown.com/series/Essential%20Workers

Ms. Brown draws these portrait of frontline essential workers, all women of color, on brown paper, since, she says, as she sees it, "“Black bodies do not need to start from white.”

Both projects appear to emphasize the careful labor drawing images of women of color by hand, as a form of homage to those who have put their lives on the line. It seems to me they share a sensibility with the more explicitly religious Ex Votos imagery found in Latin American and Latino contexts, honoring benefict interventions of the saints through the creation and offering of images, which help to intercede with divine powers. These honored women to be sure are not  venerated'saints' in a formal religious sense, but they are being honored in a profound sense through the everyday intentional labor of image making. In the face of taken for granted American systemic racism, these works of image production and dedication are doing their part to change the 'complexion' of the dominant mass culture of race, image, and power in US society.

TLC Student Collection

The third collection of The Lockdown Collection (TLC) is the Student Collection, works which are viewable at:
https://www.thelockdowncollection.com/student-collection

The works are created by art students or graduates of Artist Proof Studio and art students at the University of Johannesburg. 

 Our commentaries on this collection include:

Khosi Kunene, "19"
https://artbeyondquarantine.blogspot.com/2020/07/19-khosi-kunene.html 

Jason Langa, Umbila,
https://artbeyondquarantine.blogspot.com/2020/07/women-of-city-jason-langa-and-thulani.html

Thulani Gankca, Dark or Blue
https://artbeyondquarantine.blogspot.com/2020/07/women-of-city-jason-langa-and-thulani.html

Lungile Mbelle Conversations with Myself
https://artbeyondquarantine.blogspot.com/2020/07/conversations-with-myself-lungile-mbelle.html

Cinthia Sifa Binene, Etre Femme (To be a Woman)
https://artbeyondquarantine.blogspot.com/2020/07/etre-femme-cinthia-sifa-binene.html 

Samukelo Gqola. Culture Respecting President
https://artbeyondquarantine.blogspot.com/2020/07/culture-respecting-president-samukelo.html

Frans Thoka.  Malapa Ga A Lekane:

https://artbeyondquarantine.blogspot.com/2020/07/malapa-ga-lekane-frans-thoka.html

Clement Mohale, Unprecedented Times: 

https://artbeyondquarantine.blogspot.com/2020/07/unprecedented-times-clement-mohale.html

Tusevo Landu. Covid-19 Olympics

https://artbeyondquarantine.blogspot.com/2020/07/covid-19-olympics-tusevo-landu.html

Angelique Bougard. Covid Warrior.
 https://artbeyondquarantine.blogspot.com/2020/07/covid-warrior-angelique-bougard.html

Etre Femme: Cinthia Sifa Binene

Cinthia Sifa Binene 
Être Femme (To be a Woman)
Mixed Media
TLC Student Collection (South Africa, 2020)


Overview: A lighter skinned young woman in an elaborate fin de siecle dress gazes into a dresser mirror, almost embracing her reflected visage; a young, darker-skinned woman seated at the base of a closet filled with clothes gazes into a hand mirror. She is composed of collage that reads in part "Take it Off," and  her midriff is composed of the image of a beast, perhaps a bovine.   A girl or boy in shorts, more monochromatic than the females, stands off to the right side.




Artist's Statement:   The lockdown reminds me of the year 2007. I was 8 Years old and my family had just moved to South Africa. My siblings and I stayed at home that year while my mom

looked for work and a school for us. We learnt almost everything from our neighbours, watched shows and cartoons on TV. This time has highlighted what we truly have and what is most important - a roof over one’s head, support, structure, love and care. It has made me both grateful and deeply concerned for the health and safety of  others.

Pamela Allara   Biene’s mixed media collage “Etre Femme” poses a conundrum rather than providing a clear example. At the right is the familiar example from western art history of a young woman admiring her face in the mirror, the exemplar of female vanity. Her reflection shows a much plainer face, hardly the beauty she imagines herself to be. On the floor at her feet is the Venus of Willendorf, the historical origin of the cult of female beauty and fecundity. To her right is a bust of a male patriarch, the assurance of her proper role in society. She is surrounded by vases of white flowers, signaling that beauty is primarily attributed to women who are white. At the center of the collage is a black woman in a bathing suit, who also admires herself in the mirror. The pose is passive, in comparison to the white woman’s active pose, but this visual subordination is counteracted by the surprising tattoo on her stomach of the head of a horned animal, perhaps a cow. Is she being portrayed as an animal? And finally, standing on the far right is a pre-pubescent figure who could be either male or female---gender yet to be determined. S/he holds a heart to the chest, and wears an odd headdress. On the shoulder are two animals, one a bird, the other a rodent. Only the white woman avoids the connection of womanhood with animal. Biene seems to be suggesting that womanhood is defined quite differently depending on one’s race—or rather she is commenting on that idea with ironic humor.

Mark Auslander;  As Pam notes, in classical European art, gazing into a mirror is often depicted as a sign of Vanitas, of excessive fixation on earthly things that will ultimately pass away. Yet, here, I suggest, the mirrors may evoke a positive process of self-exploration and remembrance, occasioned by the Lockdown. The title, Être Femme ("To be a Woman)" implies a process of emerging femininity, taking place within the confines of the domestic realm. As for Alice in  Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, passage through a household mirror is figured as a journey of feminine self-discovery and unbridled imagination.  As in Usha Seejarim's Broom Closet, one of the initial works of the TLC project,  the female closet is here envisioned as an interior space of mystery and magical transformation.  The artist may be drawing as well on a longer artistic history of women privately pondering their own beauty through mirrored surfaces, as in impressionist Berthe Morrisot's Woman at her Toilette and The Psyche Mirror.  There may also be echoes of John Singer Sargent's masterpiece, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, a complex exploration of girls' psychological development over time, which in a sense culminates in a mysterious shadowy mirror.

I am unsure how to read the use of racial imagery in the work. The face of the woman wearing the late 19th century bustle dress on the left might be read as white or fair skinned, but her reflected visage in the mirror seems to be that of a woman of a color. Perhaps the artist alludes to the process of interpolated reading of images glimpsed on television screens during her childhood, in which glamorous white or light skinned stars and celebrities were re-imagined in terms that were less racially restricted. Hence, the middle female figure, seated on the floor, might be read as more comfortable in her beautiful blackness, gazed upon within a smaller hand mirror that she herself controls.  Having said that, if the image over her midsection is that of cow, as Pam suggests, the inference might be that African women remain defined in terms of livestock payments of lobola bridewealth, which legitimate her transfer from one male dominated lineage to another.  If so, is the collage written injunction to "take it off" a command to define oneself in different terms than that laid down by the patriarchy?

Mirror, Mirror

Gazing at the mirrors in Sifa Binene's enigmatic image, I find myself recalling Jean and John Comaroff's 1991 analysis of the hand mirrors distributed by British non conformist Protestant missionaries on the southern African frontier in the mid 19th century.  The evangelists celebrated the hand mirror as an exemplar of privatized individual experience, held to be foundational for transformative encounters with scripture, which offered the radical possibility of unmediated individual encounters with the Divine.  Tswana political and spiritual leaders initially resisted the hand mirror as excessively individuating, cutting off the person from the full continuum of social and spiritual inter-connectedness.

In Sifa Binese's chamber, however, the evoked journey towards self-realization does not seem to be geared towards excessive individualism; the artist emphasizes in her statement that the time of enforced confinement reminds us of our responsibilities towards others. This theme seems to made manifest in the shadowy figure of the child (perhaps the artist's siblings) in shorts on the right, who is one senses is protected by her or his older sisters, even as they launch themselves on their own interior journeys of self discovery. (This younger figure seems to have an African sculptural figure perched on his or her shoulder; perhaps we see an nkisi nkonde power figure, evocative of the artist's own Congolese heritage.)

I am reminded, as well of Jane Taylor's 2009 Lacanian reading of the mirror scene in Handspring Puppet's realization of Büchner’s play Woyzeck (directed William Kentridge, 1992 and 2008). As the adult woman puppet Maria ponders herself in her small hand mirror, she tells her infant son that she is just as beautiful as elite women who gaze at their own images in floor to ceiling full body mirrors. The scene, Taylor argues, is a complex reworking of what Lacan terms the mirror stage, in which the developing child comes to develop his or her initial experiences of selfhood (as opposed to earlier experiences of primal oneness, of unconstrained continuity between the self, the primary caregiver and the wider universe) through mimetic encounters with the face of the mother.  The skillful use of puppets by Handspring Puppets, which performatively posits an 'as if' reality to the puppet that seems to bring it to life, is equivalent to the magic of the mirror stage, through which consciousness is gradually nurtured across early childhood: by playing with and speaking to the newborn, 'as if' it were a conscious being, that developing infant increasingly gains self-awareness. Thus, through the play of fantasy, sentience is miraculously catalyzed in the real world.

I do not know if Sifa Binene is familiar with the Kentridge/Handspring Puppets production of Woyzeck, but her work can be read in comparable light: the central seated figure's self-exploration through the hand mirror links her both to the standing elite woman of lost time to the left, and to the developing boy on the right, calling into being, within her own mind and within this beautiful room, the complex glittering constellation of family development and attachment, which will sustain her, and all of us, across the life course.

References.

Comaroff, Jean and John. 1991. Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Taylor, Jane, 2009.  Editor's Introduction. Handspring Puppet Company. Edited by Jane Taylor.

Parkwood, South Africa, David Krut.

"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.