The images in Kings County at Stevenson Gallery question the sexuality, the banality of work and studio practice – the everyday routine of many artists, writes Athi Mongezeleli Joja.
On the night of the opening a curator at Stevenson Gallery welcomes me with her usual warmth. I mention, jokingly, that the show is rather poorly attended. She smiles but reveals a situation that had skipped my mind: “People in Cape Town don’t attend openings of artists they don’t know.”
But Kings County, a group show of five, comprises notable and emerging names in contemporary African art to be either unknown or poorly attended. The term “Kings County” is an epithet for Brooklyn, New York. Interestingly, Brooklyn and Cape Town share historical parallels as cities first invaded by the Dutch trading companies and then the British. But, unlike Cape Town, Brooklyn is noted for its cultural diversity.
‘Distortions about Africa and its cultures’
Well, we are all too familiar with Cape Town’s “moody swings”, and more so to its untoward disdain for blacks. And it seems that not even the Kings County’s visit will shake the city out of this notorious bigotry. “When I am in Brooklyn, at least in certain parts of it, I feel that no one can walk up to me and demand to know what I’m doing there,” writes art historian and novelist Teju Cole in a featured piece attributed to the show. His comment momentarily comes too close to delete the prevalence of generalised anti-black violence as a global problem.
In another he humorously jerks us back to reality. “This world exists simply to satisfy the needs – including, importantly, the sentimental needs – of white people and Oprah [Winfrey].” Meleko Mokgosi’s formal temperament complements Cole’s but seems less preoccupied with the Kings County’s benign peculiarity. Using text as image, or vice versa, Mokgosi reproduces 19th- and 20th-century museum wall texts and superimposes inscriptions on them to point out to us their casual display of distortions about Africa and its cultures.
By way of rebutting commentaries, quotes and marks, the artist shows how this appetite for othering, and its distortive labour, is an ersatz substitute for the West’s own self-imaging. Here there’s more than just a critique of the colonial archive; we’re invited to think how such modes of abjection are recuperated in the contemporary. Similarities also abound between Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Paul Mpagi Seku-ya, whose work captures indoor intimacy in relatively subdued and often in autobiographical ways. Crosby’s paintings, both large and garish, depict moments often omitted or forgotten in most artistic production.
Kings County isn’t a touristy promotion of Brooklyn, as we might easily assume, but a gathering of visual thoughts on far more interesting things.
For full report by see Mail & Guardian
Kings County is on at Stevenson Gallery, Buchanan Building, 160 Sir Lowry’s Road, Woodstock, until November 22
PHOTO: Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s ‘Mama, Mummy and Mamma’.
