Exhibition curated by Nicole Sarmiento featuring the work of Gabrielle Goliath & Dathini Mzayiya
Rewind brings Gabrielle Goliath and Dathini Mzayiya’s visual and sonoric work to the Centre for African Studies Gallery. Both artists grapple with the complexities, contradictions and violences of the everyday in this place we call South Africa. As a title for this show, Rewind points towards questions of temporality: of going back, re-visiting, re-membering or re-living. Their work implodes on the notion that time is linear, neatly packaged into ‘pasts’, ‘presents’ and ‘futures’, presenting us with a profound commentary on the multiple temporalities we inhabit.
Neither linear nor cyclical, the work of these two artists speaks to notions of co- presence; of depth, layers and recapitulation. The violence that haunts the present is not one that we can simply call postcolonial or postapartheid. Rather, it is useful to think of events, of wounds, that are constantly repeated, relived and recapitulated, calling to mind that we live as inheritors of a past that remains difficult to name and yet oversaturates our contemporary moment. The business of naming does not elude their work, but is posed as an imperative, or a call to act, imagine and rethink the now in the context of that co-presence.
This October, 2012, we mark not only the recent tragedy at Marikana, but we do so while also re-calling Sharpeville, Soweto, Jagersfontein. Further away, we remember the invasion of Grenada and the loss of Maurice Bishop. We recently marked the anniversary of another loss, that of the great ancestor Steven Biko. Mzayiya’s work forces us to take a critical look at today in the context of the past, and those events we still mourn and have yet to name. Goliath’s very personal journey, and her ceremonial treatment of the singularity of a life, speaks to a kind of violence that is so normalized it is not regarded as anything worth marking. Her work delves into what are viewed as ‘micro’ events, pushed outside the sphere of that which is deemed publicly grievable. Rewind, not as a verb, but as a directive, an imperative to imagine alternative ways of mourning, but also imagining other possible, more human possibilities of life on this planet today.