There is much to be said and done in crafting the meaning of Ubuzwe in South Africa, what is it that brings the past to the present and what is it that hold our future in arrest.
There is much to be said and done in crafting the meaning of Ubuzwe in South Africa, what is it that brings the past to the present and what is it that hold our future in arrest.
Ubuzwe in isiXhosa means a nation, nationhood and sense of belonging. Makandula’s interpretation of the landmark that is Ntaba kaNdoda is the continuation on the works of SEK Mqhayi, David Goldblatt, Cedric Nunn and myself who either in words, photographs or video have brought this place to the national consciousness.
Ubuzwe is an exhibition by Sikhumbuzo Makandula, a BFA student from Rhodes University, currently up at Albany Museum (History Building) open until tomorrow, November 11. This exhibition consists of photographs on three walls of the gallery, a video projection on the fourth wall and an installation in the centre of the gallery.
The video projection titled Isigidimi (2016) and installation work draws us to a landscape that fight for its traumatised history, like an abandoned child.
The idea of nationhood, nationality, and of belonging floats between a realm of the living and the dead. Isigidimi is isiXhosa for a messenger, usually someone who will relay a message in the shortest possible time; like the spaceman who explores the unsettled colony.
Tediously at first the artist walks up to the beast and rips it like a quiet deranged madman. This is what it means to deal with this nation, and the relics and legacy from its past. Violent, quick and silently, Makandula performs for the camera, by appearing in different cloaks and apparatus, his characters embody these traits of violence.
They sit tentatively uncomfortable without a specific targeted group, rather we are all implicated.
Despite the presence of a centralised installation piece, the video projection takes central stage, in a way that ones eyes are constantly pulled to it; with the soundtrack it forces you to keep a constant watch.
The projection seems to overpower the rest of the works on display, and seems disintegrated from the remaining body of work. The artist would have considered other means of presenting the work in a way that it could be read coherently to draw the viewers into the idea of the meaning of Ubuzwe, possibly the installation would have been moved closer to the video.
By bringing it close to the video the audience would have been forced to view it by looking through the hanging sjamboks could eliminate the tendency of video projections to be viewed from a distance.Further the light from the video would have reflected on the masks creating a rather interesting and more integrated piece.
The central installation piece is cast out faces laid on the floor facing hanging sjamboks. They hang in tension but not quite aggressively and loaded with weight on top of the faces.
One of the questions that comes to mind is whose faces were these cast from? What happen to these people?
That they should be facing an object of torture! All the eyes on the faces are closed, seemingly calmly closed, and not one has a different expression from the other. It would have been interesting for the artists to explore further how to express emotions of pain inflicted on their bodies.
For some reason in the same way that the video sort of pulls away from the installation, the central installation also pulls our eyes away from the photographs on the wall, which fill up half of the space, lit rather low.
The lighting works on the black and white photographs, but almost ruin the larger colour photographs.
On the one wall there are three photographic series; the first one is Ubuzwe I and II (2016), where we get the title for the exhibition and shows artists interacting with Buntu Fihla’s Isizathu esihle singafihla ububi which illustrated element from former Ciskie Coat of Arms, mainly the Indwe bird with fallen beak, and four ivory rings worn by chiefs representing four main African nations of the Ciskie.
The second series is The Promise Land (2016), shot on location on Ntaba ka Ndoda Mountain, where the artists stands on the other side of a small pond, with raised hands as if calling on the water people to rise up, and walk with him in his journey.
The most successful of the photographic series is the Dictator I – VIII (2016), parodying perhaps LL Sebe, in his famous public speeches, embarrassing his political enemies. In this series Makandula gives us a beautiful dictator, an almost calm but still menacing, masked or direct gazing charactor.
On the adjacent wall Umhlahleli (2016) series gives us a ghostly and the most challenging character, presenting us with Armageddon, as if pacifying us to submit to a failed nation state. Like the ripper, gauging our last days on this continent.
The last series of photographs which I find less successful is Ukubamba elentulo (2016), which feels repetitive and confused, and could possible need more time by the artist to work and develop further.
Makandula invites us to share his world, he projects these psychological, historical and ideological meditation beautifully in the face of much hardship that the myths of the nationhood has brought us.
