The
exhibition Re-membering: Memory,
Intimacy, Archive opening this week at the KZNSA Gallery features works by
South African artists Reshma Chhiba, Sharlene Khan and Jordache A Ellapen from
their projects titled Kali (2008) and
The Two Talking Yonis (2013); When the Moon Waxes Red (2016); and Queering the Archive: Brown Bodies in
Ecstasy (2016/2017) respectively.
In these
projects, through the lens of the ‘Indian’ experience, these artists explore
and unsettle notions of memory, race, class, gender, and sexuality in
post-apartheid South Africa and comment on the nuances and complexities of
everyday life in South Africa.
In Chhiba’s
works, the Hindu goddess Kāli is a central starting point where particular
reference is made to her iconography and mythology. For her series, Khan works
with different visual media like video-art, digital photography, and
needle-lace to produce “visual textured narratives”, which narrate the
difficult circumstances experienced by migratory women.
Ellapen
engages black and white archival studio photographs and digital photographs to
produce digital “visual assemblages” that disrupts the heteronormative logics
of family, community, and nation. Their works jointly speak to everyday
experiences and performativities of identities shaped through the tensions of
cultural migrations, familial love, loss and mythologies that are too often
simplistically and sentimentally rendered. These entanglements add richness to
a segment of South African history that is still lacking.
When the Moon Waxes Red and Queering the Archive: Brown Bodies in Ecstasy both make reference
to Indian indenture migration in South Africa and use this historical
experience in order to understand citizenships, belonging and subjectivity in
the post-apartheid period. The archive is an important element in each project
and is incorporated by the artists very differently.
Each
artist draws on family archives, offering an alternative perspective of the
Indian experience from state sanctioned or popular media archives. The family
archive is an “intimate archive” that becomes the springboard for the visual
creative expressions and aesthetic practices of each artist.
Khan’s
“intimate archive” draws on oral traditions of story-telling in which family
histories, secrets, and memories are passed down from generation to generation.
Khan was influenced by the stories she heard of Indian indentureship growing up
in an Indian township in Durban, about women from her family and community who
hung, burnt and drowned themselves in order to escape their social conditions,
but also tales of creativities, support networks and hardships overcome. When The Moon Waxes Red draws on
narratives which the artist transforms into needle-lace portraits, visualizing
the black feminist notion of ‘textured narrativisation’, which aims not at
truth-telling but rather bio-mythography meant to capture spirit rather than
truth.
The
starting point of Chhiba’s explorations of Kali began as she delved into her
family history, where her maternal grandmother (Ajima) suddenly emerged as the
central figure in her thinking, writing and making processes. And even though
Ajima had already passed on by the time these works started to emerge in her
imagination, her presence in Chhiba’s consciousness was tangible as she
uncovered parts of the story of her life through discussions with her mother.
Similar to Khan and Ellapen, Chhiba’s work is influenced by the intimacies of
the familial space through which she accessed an alternative archive – that of
the memory of her grandmother. Kali and The Two Talking Yonis both explore
various symbolic elements of the goddess such as the tongue and yoni,
depictions and explorations of Kali’s portrait, and the mythology of Kali in
relation to issues of identity, by referencing classical Indian dance. The
tongue and yoni both speak of violence, sexuality, mockery, protest, and are
invariably interchangeable. Chhiba’s investigations of womanhood and depictions
of the female body in contemporary South Africa is intimately connected to her
interest in exploring the overlaps between tradition and modernity, mythology
and reality, feminine and masculine, black and Indian, visual art and dance,
artist and curator. Chhiba’s work pushes us to think beyond these binary
formations, emphasizing multiple and contradictory identities and
subjectivities by foregrounding the power of the feminine.
All
three artists are engaged in “memory” and “recovery” work, using their own
bodies in a postcolonial masquerading in order to trouble stereotypes of
‘Indianness’ in South Africa by focusing on the intersectionalities between
class, gender, ethnicity, nationalism and homoeroticism. Their works jointly
speak to everyday experiences and performativities of identities shaped through
the tensions of cultural migrations, familial love, loss and mythologies that
are too often simplistically and sentimentally rendered. These entanglements
add richness to a segment of South African history that is still lacking.
Re-membering: Memory, Intimacy, Archive runs at the KZNSA Gallery in the
Main, Mezzanine and Media Galleries from August 15 to September 3. The KZNSA
Gallery is situated at 166 Bulwer
Road, Glenwood, in Durban. More information on 031 277 1705, fax
031 201 8051 or cell 082 220 0368 or visit www.kznsa.co.za
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