Kemang Wa Lehulere
In this diptych, one from a series of similar stagings between chalk drawing and found artwork, Kemang Wa Lehulere pairs memory’s image against its near-likeness. This imperfect mirroring is a gesture of reclamation, where remembered impressions stand as testament in the absence of historical records. The project began with a chance encounter. While visiting his aunt, Sophia Lehulere, in Gugulethu, the township in which Wa Lehulere was raised, a neighbour dropped by with a copy of Elza Mile’s monograph NOMFANEKISO, who paints at night, the art of Gladys Mgudlandlu (2002). Sophia Lehulere recognised the paintings and told her nephew that she had met Mgudlandlu as a child in the early 1970s. As she recalled, the interior of the artist’s home was illuminated with murals. Wa Lehulere was unsure what to make of these remembered scenes, having no written or photographic record against which to test his aunt’s recollections. Sophia Lehulere had suffered a traumatic head injury during the student uprising in 1976, a subject on which she remained silent. Any mention of apartheid and its manifold violences was proscribed in her presence; a history muted by a gunshot wound. But she continued to describe the murals in intricate detail, remembering their colours first, their images second.
Over the following months, Wa Lehulere visited the late Mgudlandlu’s home, only a few streets away from where his aunt lived. He took measurements of the space, reconstructing it in his studio, and asked Sophia Lehulere to plot the remembered murals. These he transposed onto smaller blackboards, retaining his aunt’s hesitations and revisions, and set alongside watercolours and prints by Mgudlandlu purchased at a London auction. He later returned to the artist’s house, where the current owner allowed him to lift a small section of wall. From beneath nine layers of household paint and plaster, a fragment of mural appeared: a single, yellow-beaked bird. To Wa Lehulere, this image not only affirmed the artist’s life and Sophia Lehulere’s recollections but mirrored his aunt’s new willingness to excavate her past. As he recalled: “The discovery of that bird in Mgudlandlu’s house was very beautiful in the sense that the cage had opened up somehow.” Beneath the silence of trauma, of sudden and insidious violence, a memory of birdsong.
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.
