Kemang Wa Lehulere
This performance was included in the programming curated by Lerato Bereng for the opening of the exhibition Dada South? Experimentation, Radicalism and Resistance, December 12, 2009. It is indexed here as part of head curators Kathryn Smith and Roger van Wyk’s revisiting of the Dada South? Archive of materials at A4 Arts Foundation.
Created specifically for Dada South?, Fragmented Texts was a response to Dadaist Tristan Tzara’s 'Sotho Negro' poems. For Wa Lehulere, these poems attempted to record in writing the otherwise oral poetic utterances that serve as markers of manhood in Sotho male initiations. Having previously participated in these rites of passage himself, he bore an armature of branches that recalled the lodgings made by young aspirants and proceeded to interject the inaugural speeches of the director of Iziko South African National Gallery and the curators of the show. In a gesture foreshadowing subsequent interrogations of memory and apartheid-era education in his later installation work, Wa Lehulere shredded Afrikaans poetry books with a cheese grater along the way.
b.1984, Cape Town
Working against collective forgetting, Kemang Wa Lehulere gives to South Africa’s recent past images, objects and gestures – each a mnemonic sign for those stories lost in historical abstraction. His installations and performances navigate between amnesia and archive, affording poetic translations of memory’s mechanisms. Wa Lehulere counts among his many mediums collaboration, quotation, objects found and made, and chalk. To chalk he gives material significance, for its pedagogy, its fragility, the palimpsest of a blackboard. It extends, he suggests, “into broader ideas around history and memory; the writability of history…the erasure of history, the marginalisation of certain histories, and the re-writing of history.” Wa Lehulere’s historical impulse is not one of nostalgia, but rather a critical re-examination of inherited truths. History, after all, is not static but generative. To the artist, it lends itself to be reimagined and revised.
