Artist Meleko Mokgosi explores the ruse of democracy and the agency of individuals within it, writes Kwanele Sosibo.
Meleko Mokgosi’s solo exhibition Comrades is so powerful that in a matter of a few panels of paintings and ancillary text, it brings into sharp focus all the violence of capture and the muted horror of the past 22 years of “flag freedom”.
Currently showing at Cape Town’s Stevenson Gallery, Comrades forms the second chapter of the artist’s Democratic Intuition project. This in turn comes on the heels of his eight-chapter installation project Pax Kaffraria, in which Mokgosi looked at postcolonial aesthetics alongside issues of national identification, globalisation, trans-nationality and whiteness.
The series title is apparently a reference to United States academic and theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who, according to a note on the website of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in the US, “suggests that to recognise the ability of other individuals and their children to think abstractly and take part in civic life is inherently democratic. Mokgosi is interested in the pursuit of recognition as both a primary goal of suppressed peoples and the essence of artistic expression.”
Mokgosi’s oeuvre is carefully considered work that respects form, only to subvert it. Like Pax Kaffraria, Comrades is nostalgic, if only in a discomforting way.
With this installment in the saga of Democratic Intuition, Mokgosi is beguilingly instructive and interventionist – not only asking the questions but suggesting that the answers were with us all along.
Comrades is on at Stevenson, 160 Sir Lowry Rd, Woodstock , Cape Town 7925, until February 27.
For full review by Kwanele Sosibo see Mail & Guardian
