An exhibition of works by Khanyisile Mbongwa & Zanele Muholi curated by Nicole Sarmiento
The multi-media exhibition hosted at the CAS Gallery space brings together photography, sculpture and video installations put together by Zanele Muholi and Khanyisile Mbongwa. The traces and textures of the performance by Mbongwa, taking place on the evening of the opening, asks us to engage with the ephemerality of performance, the unspoken and embodied. This collaboration circulates around the idea of “inside the in-between” – or “interstices” – literal, metonymic, corporeal, metaphorical. The artists respond to the economies of violence of the everyday, to bodies marked and inscribed in particular ways. The work in this space is a result of two artists/activists who respond to the quiet violence of heteronormative gendering, racialising and naming.
I see the work as a conversation that happens between these two individuals and their work when their methods, ways of seeing and creating coincide, share space and collide. The works reflect the silences, pauses, as well as how these non-verbal whispers speak. The artists move beyond bearing witness and respond to violent foreclosures and planned obsolescences with alternative imaginaries, plotting new ways of seeing, imagining and articulating interiorities.
A number of collaborators were part of making this exhibition possible. Justin Davy worked on conceptualizing and editing Khanyisile’s short film and video installation. Siona O’Connell, Lilian Jacobs, Thuto Thipe, Mawande Zenzile, Sabelo Mcinziba, Teena Dewoo, Kapeesh Manilal, Rebecca Fasselt, Natasha Himmelman and Chandra Frank also helped make this exhibition possible.
The exhibition was put together as part of the workshop “Thinking Africa and the African Diaspora Differently: Theories, Practices, Imaginaries” that involved the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town, ‘the names we give’ at Michaelis School of the Arts, Chimurenga, The University of the West Indies Centre for Caribbean Thought, Brown University Africana Studies and the University of Addis Ababa Humanities Faculty.