signifying the impossible song

Featured artists include Sanford Biggers (USA), Kamyar Bineshtarigh (Iran/South Africa), Patrick Bongoy (DRC), Ange Dakouo (Mali), Bonolo Kavula (South Africa), Nthabiseng Kekana (South Africa), Roméo Mivekannin (Ivory Coast/France), Turiya Magadlela (South Africa), Nandipha Mntambo (Eswatini/South Africa), Zanele Muholi (South Africa), Oluseye (Nigeria/Canada), Zohra Opoku (Germany/Ghana), Zizipho Poswa (South Africa), Usha Seejarim (South Africa), Inga Somdyala (South Africa), Moffat Takadiwa (Zimbabwe) and Lulama Wolf (South Africa).

signifying the impossible song explores the material culture of objects and the protected knowledges they hold. Encompassing mixed-media artworks, found objects, assemblage, photography, sculpture and painting, the exhibition points to the collective unravelling and structural failings of political systems. There are multiple forces in effect – integration and disintegration, defiance and displacement – the cyclical rhythm suggesting the human project as an ongoing process of fabrication and refabrication.

Raymond and Terblanche ask:

“How do you signify an impossible song? What does it mean for choral harmony to be discordant, laboured, flailing? As Carl Adamshick writes in his poem Our Flag, from which the exhibition’s title is drawn, ‘Our flag should be a veil’. How else does one speak to war, famine, inequality, ecological ruin, gender and race injustice, and othering? This is the real – unfathomable, incomplete, endless. Artists and cultural workers graciously assume the perpetual task of representation within an increasingly divisive and violent world. No history, anthology, or census is complete. Similarly, no artistic mission is either.”

Representation in art is a form of order, of “organising the world and reality through the act of naming its elements[1]”. An artist’s intuition – the impulse to weave thread into fabric, to extract clay or flora from the ground to shape anew, or to collect and alter materials found across space and time – touches a fundamental human urge to transmute our immediate surroundings to make sense of both present and past.

Conceptual artist Sanford Biggers investigates the conventions of representation, interrupting historical narratives by juxtaposing recognisable cultural symbols. The exhibition includes works from his Chimera and Codex series, which although distinct in their visual, formal and conceptual languages, both probe the physical and symbolic origins of myth. Biggers reimagines remnants from the past – Classical marble sculptures, traditional African masks and antique American quilts – to call into question their attendant meanings, metaphors and associations.

While Biggers conceptualises through vast media exploration, Bonolo Kavula hones in on a singular, culturally resonant material: traditional shweshwe cloth, inspired by a dress of her mother’s, now a family heirloom. Kavula’s near-translucent tapestries are built from tiny cloth discs connected by thread at mathematical intervals into ghostly geometric grids. These abstract meditations, shaped by repeated gestures of care and preservation, are embedded with collective histories of culture and ancestry.

Within the material worlds that each artist in signifying the impossible song experiences, there are invented worlds that emerge. These are based on real events – personal and collective memories of democracy, nationalism, civil protest, social movements, socio-cultural norms, material cultures, language and writing systems – as well as on fictional scenarios, drawing on and reimagining folklore, mythologies, dreams and utopias.

In Inga Somdyala’s re-interpretation of a failed political covenant, two contending South African flags representing the old and new political orders are resurrected, yet they curve (or slump, wounded) onto the floor. Together, their colours make up South Africa’s post-1994 national flag – a hopeful, albeit fraught symbol of a unified ‘rainbow nation’ – speaking to what Somdyala describes as the “whimpering conclusion to the Apartheid struggle, where a negotiated peace among the political and economic elite fails to dismantle the fundamentally racist structures within South African society”.

In Oluseye’s Hot Commodity series, totems of vertically stacked vending machines containing perceived signifiers of Blackness interrogate the facile engagement with Black culture as mere commodity. The work brings together a range of items and ideas associated with Black people – hair, black-eyed peas, music, cotton and a fictional ‘Black Magic’ detergent – to confront the appropriation and commercialisation of Blackness and Black people in popular culture and the industrial complex.

The human need to collect items of spiritual, sentimental and cultural resonance, and surround ourselves with these for comfort and identity-assurance, arises in the materiality of Patrick Bongoy, Ange Dakouo, Turiya Magadlela, Usha Seejarim and Moffat Takadiwa.

Assembled materials and objects come into being through the collation of many disparate elements; they remind us that the whole is made up of what was once fragmented. In this way, signifying the impossible song is interested in substrates, the under-layers, what lies beneath and between our perceptions and interactions. Seejarim’s Receptible is one such example of this: grass brooms are layered in circular rows to create the form of a pot, conflating the modes of basket-weaving and clay coiling. Abundant and hut-like, her vessel simultaneously evokes African and African-American customs of ‘jumping over the broom’: a marital ritual implementing the new wife’s role to perform service through household labour. The mundane broom transforms into a signifier of projected femininity, domesticity and subservience.

The bitter irony of Africa’s natural wealth is engrained in the repurposed materials of Bongoy, Dakouo and Takadiwa. Employed en masse, the detritus of daily life is recirculated into a commentary on the complexities of post-colonial economies forced to put subsistence over ecological preservation. Rubber scraps, toothbrushes, pens, newsprint – their wall reliefs are made from the hangover of past injustices, yet the skillful intervention of the hand exemplifies the ongoing process of rearticulating and rebuilding across the Global South.

Towards the end of Adamshick’s poem, the utopian ideal of a unanimous flag has deteriorated. Instead of being an overarching emblem, this flag has been eclipsed by the process of consensus-building itself – open-ended, imperfect, ongoing:

“Let it be the eloquence

of the process shining

on the page, a beacon

on the edge of a continent.

Let its warnings be dismissed.

Let it be insignificant

and let its insignificance shine.”

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[1] Mitchell, W. 1995, Representation, F Lentricchia & T McLaughlin (eds), Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2nd edn, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.