“The language of Amarhoqololo is either (1) mobilised as a slur thrown unfairly at children (sometimes by other children) when they fail to write and draw, or (2) commonly used to refer to a general failure at symbolic representation, that is, representation as it pertains to language and the visual domain. Amarhoqololo then marks a point of failure to live up to convention or points to one’s perceived susceptibility to error. Its relation to language (and speech) signals a certain psychic investment in legibility; the burden of the rational modern subject whose faculties for thought must align with one’s conscious enunciation”.
Kemang Wa Lehulere’s latest body of work consisting of abstract paintings delves into the profound weight of "Amarhoqololo," a term that marks a failure to live up to convention in symbolic representations, as ascribed to critic and artist Vusi Nkomo in the citation above – whether in the scrawl of a child's drawing or the perceived misstep of language itself, "Amarhoqololo" speaks to a deep and continuing societal preoccupation, interest and impulse to forge and make meaning, and in the face of our contemporary moment; forging meaning against a backdrop that refuses to cohere.
It is precisely within this charged terrain of competing historical narratives; overlooked narratives; and the collapse of consensus that the persistent desire for legibility in the work of Wa Lehulere finds its vital pulse. “Maybe it is a rehearsal for sense-making that I am involved with”, as Wa Lehulere says in one of his letter exchanges discussing these works with Pehr Mårtens, dated March 2025. “Each painting a baton from one painting to the other, perhaps allowing for the works the be easily read as a suite”. A notated jazz composition, an idiom that has not been uncommon in Wa Lehulere’s ouvre.
In an unsurprising act of borrowing from his vast visual language, some of the paintings in this suite are sub-lain in black paint, reminiscent of his use of black school boards. What follows are layers of abstract marks and strokes and (notes) in bewildering colour and rhythm. Acts of improvisation and spontaneous combustions of free-form composition so essential in the jazz art form, a form which Wa Lehulere is so deeply imbued with and deftly draws from.
Through these paintings, much like his use of drawing, performance, installation, and salvaged objects, Wa Lehulere champions the “susceptibility to error" not as a flaw, but as a rich ground for exploration. He gives voice to the unspoken and visible form to the intangible, often inviting collaborators to fill in the gaps that emerge from the passage of time or to grant his own memory a higher fidelity.
Wa Lehulere’s art continues to be a powerful meditation on how we make sense of the present (meaning the past) when its records are incomplete, and how, in the face of imposed legibility, new forms of symbolic representation can emerge, even if they bear the beautiful, complex marks of what was once deemed "Amarhoqololo."
- Vusi Nkomo, The legitimacy of illegibility: Kemang Wa Lehulere’s indeterminate marks (2025)
Kemang Wa Lehulere’s latest body of work consisting of abstract paintings delves into the profound weight of "Amarhoqololo," a term that marks a failure to live up to convention in symbolic representations, as ascribed to critic and artist Vusi Nkomo in the citation above – whether in the scrawl of a child's drawing or the perceived misstep of language itself, "Amarhoqololo" speaks to a deep and continuing societal preoccupation, interest and impulse to forge and make meaning, and in the face of our contemporary moment; forging meaning against a backdrop that refuses to cohere.
It is precisely within this charged terrain of competing historical narratives; overlooked narratives; and the collapse of consensus that the persistent desire for legibility in the work of Wa Lehulere finds its vital pulse. “Maybe it is a rehearsal for sense-making that I am involved with”, as Wa Lehulere says in one of his letter exchanges discussing these works with Pehr Mårtens, dated March 2025. “Each painting a baton from one painting to the other, perhaps allowing for the works the be easily read as a suite”. A notated jazz composition, an idiom that has not been uncommon in Wa Lehulere’s ouvre.
In an unsurprising act of borrowing from his vast visual language, some of the paintings in this suite are sub-lain in black paint, reminiscent of his use of black school boards. What follows are layers of abstract marks and strokes and (notes) in bewildering colour and rhythm. Acts of improvisation and spontaneous combustions of free-form composition so essential in the jazz art form, a form which Wa Lehulere is so deeply imbued with and deftly draws from.
Through these paintings, much like his use of drawing, performance, installation, and salvaged objects, Wa Lehulere champions the “susceptibility to error" not as a flaw, but as a rich ground for exploration. He gives voice to the unspoken and visible form to the intangible, often inviting collaborators to fill in the gaps that emerge from the passage of time or to grant his own memory a higher fidelity.
Wa Lehulere’s art continues to be a powerful meditation on how we make sense of the present (meaning the past) when its records are incomplete, and how, in the face of imposed legibility, new forms of symbolic representation can emerge, even if they bear the beautiful, complex marks of what was once deemed "Amarhoqololo."
Kemang Wa Lehulere was born in 1984 in Cape Town. To date, he has had solo exhibitions at Göteborg Konsthall, Sweden, Tate Modern, UK, the Pasquart Art Centre, Switzerland, MAXXI, Italy, the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle, Germany and the Art Institute of Chicago, USA. Selected group exhibitions include Centre Pompidou, Paris, 58th Venice Biennale, A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town, Performa 17, New York, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, among others.
Wa Lehulere was a co-founder of Gugulective (2006), an artist-led collective based in Cape Town, and a founding member of the Center for Historical Reenactments (2010) in Johannesburg. In 2017, he was Deutsche Bank’s ‘Artist of the Year’, recieved the fourth Malcolm McLaren Award and was a finalist in the Future Generation Art Prize in Kyiv, Ukraine. He is the winner of the 2015 Standard Bank South Africa, Young Artist Award and is one of two young artists awarded the 15th Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel in 2013.
Wa Lehulere was a co-founder of Gugulective (2006), an artist-led collective based in Cape Town, and a founding member of the Center for Historical Reenactments (2010) in Johannesburg. In 2017, he was Deutsche Bank’s ‘Artist of the Year’, recieved the fourth Malcolm McLaren Award and was a finalist in the Future Generation Art Prize in Kyiv, Ukraine. He is the winner of the 2015 Standard Bank South Africa, Young Artist Award and is one of two young artists awarded the 15th Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel in 2013.
His work is represented in several notable public and institutional collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago (USA), Centre Pompidou (France), Deutsche Bank (Germany), Es Baluard (Spain), Hirshhorn Museum (USA) and Tate London (UK).
blank is pleased to present Bring Back Lost Love, a solo exhibition by Kemang Wa Lehulere. Encompassing sculptures, drawings, and installation, Bring Back Lost Love is conceived as a symphony that excavates personal and collective memory, real and imagined, to address neglected or discarded narratives of South African history. Through a retelling of stories that traverse fact and fiction, the exhibition invokes questions of land ownership and migration in relation to the various legislations that violently disinherited black South Africans of land. Bring Back Lost Love evidences Wa Lehulere’s process of unearthing as a strategy for historiographic disruption and critique. To ‘bring back’ is not only to return, but to exhume, retrieve, and reinstate.
Suspended within the central exhibition space is the installation titled Black Forest. Describing the works, Wa Lehulere states,
Collaborating again with his aunt, the artist adopted a call-and-response strategy synonymous with free jazz – in which the lead musician “calls” for a response from the ensemble to create a new and unscripted melody and rhythm – to create ERF, a body of ink drawings that depict imaginary landscapes. The drawings recall the legacy of the late artist Gladys Mgudlandlu whose bucolic, colourful landscape paintings are interpreted as a critique of the status quo by their very exclusion of political themes. Mgudlandlu was a school teacher who taught Sophia Lehulere before their families were relocated from Athlone to Gugulethu under the Group Areas Act. The drawings that form ERF are inspired by the scenery and natural elements found in Mgudlandlu’s work; specifically the murals that adorned her home, which Wa Lehulere’s aunt recalls from memory.
In Reddening of the Greens, the theme of movement and migration is carried through the installation of worn suitcases, wooden crutches and birdhouse assemblages made out of salvaged school desks. Explaining the significance of these materials and their multiple readings, Wa Lehulere recalls the journeys of German philosopher Walter Benjamin and South African writer Nat Nakasa, both of whom tragically committed suicide when in exile. Assembled together, the objects convey multiple meanings – the suitcases are representative of journeys but also displacement, while the crutch is interpreted as a means of support but also hindered progress. The incomplete birdhouses made of cut up school desks suggest the symbolic promises of freedom, and the failures of the institutions that govern, police, and educate us.
The installation Conference of the Birds is an assembly of sixteen bird-boxes constructed from salvaged school desks, interspersed with music stands, ceramic dogs, and paper scrolls, and surrounded by chalk boards protruding at angles from the walls. Taking its title from an album by the Dave Holland Quartet, Conference of the Birds is inspired by the 1993 Gatherings Act of South Africa, which allowed a maximum of fifteen protesters to gather without a permit: the sixteenth person makes the protest illegal. In addition to universal references to collectivity, freedom and peace, birds in Southern African folk tales can also allude to symbols of the female sex and gender conflicts, as well as mediators between the spiritual world and the material world. Universal symbols of instruction, the chalkboards are populated with drawings and sketches alluding to crowds of people, depicted as swarming masses of dots, or Xs in sequence. Here and there are portions of text, obliterated and obscured like the rolled up messages strewn about the floor. Through the use of these metaphors, the work speaks to ideas of connectedness, networks and communing. In South Africa, protests – often accompanied by song – are heavily policed. Though they are mass-produced as kitsch household ornaments, the presence of the ceramic Alsatian dogs in the installation is a reminder of ‘police dogs’ and the force of state violence that protesters were often met with during such gatherings.
Also included in the exhibition is a letter addressed to the Nobel Peace Prize committee. In it, Wa Lehulere appeals to the institution to retrospectively honour the late author Sol T. Plaatje with the unallocated 1914 award for his monumental work, Native Life in South Africa, which was written in response to the Native Land Act. Although the institution does not award the prize posthumously, Wa Lehulere nevertheless posits the importance of acknowledging Plaatje’s contributions to literature through his chronicling of the Black experience. In doing so, the artist attempts to intervene, or collaborate with time and history by proposing a redress of recognition for Plaatje’s oeuvre.
Curator and critic Khwezi Gule writes:
“Wa Lehulere’s work is not so much about history or histories but the points at which certain (historical) trajectories are interrupted on a personal level (exile, suicide) and a systemic socio-political level (forced removals, the Land Act), and the intersection of the two. In a sense, his practice explores how the historical does not just manifest in the personal but how the personal is constitutive of the historical. Another major theme running through the artist’s practice is the abortive attempt to suture, reassemble, to graft prostheses onto these interrupted narratives and trajectories. These become surrogates for what was lost in the ruptures. Aborted, though, because the act of grafting (new) histories on old injuries serves not to ameliorate or cover up the injury but to accentuate and deepen the sense of loss.”
Bring Back Lost Love is Wa Lehulere’s first exhibition with the gallery.
Exhibition press:
Blackman, M. Kemang Wa Lehulere Summons a Black Intellectual Tradition. ArtReview [online] (published 28 March 2023)
Moloi, N. Kemang Wa Lehulere at blank projects. Artforum, vol. 61, no. 9 (published May 2023)
Suspended within the central exhibition space is the installation titled Black Forest. Describing the works, Wa Lehulere states,
I am interested in the idea of mapping, relating to questions of displacement and land. And an inspiration for the layout of this piece comes from the Lars von Trier film, Dogville. The installation consists of blackboards as a suspended landscape with drawings and elements made from concrete, salvaged school desks and porcelain dogs. The chalk drawing is a geographical representation of the neighbourhood where I grew up in Gugulethu, Cape Town. This was also a location during apartheid, to which many black people were sent, after they had been forcibly removed from other areas that had been deemed white only. In the installation I have also integrated casts of my aunt Sophia’s hands depicting notation from the sign language alphabet, but abstracted, as I am interested in notions of (il)legibility. Upon the floor are bottles, reminiscent of Molotov cocktails, a popular weapon of protest during apartheid. Each bottle contains sand and small wrapped paper messages that function as a metaphor for the many untold stories in our community and speak to African spirituality and the communication with our ancestors. The bottles thus become markers of violence and protest and a desire for our stories to be told and heard.
Collaborating again with his aunt, the artist adopted a call-and-response strategy synonymous with free jazz – in which the lead musician “calls” for a response from the ensemble to create a new and unscripted melody and rhythm – to create ERF, a body of ink drawings that depict imaginary landscapes. The drawings recall the legacy of the late artist Gladys Mgudlandlu whose bucolic, colourful landscape paintings are interpreted as a critique of the status quo by their very exclusion of political themes. Mgudlandlu was a school teacher who taught Sophia Lehulere before their families were relocated from Athlone to Gugulethu under the Group Areas Act. The drawings that form ERF are inspired by the scenery and natural elements found in Mgudlandlu’s work; specifically the murals that adorned her home, which Wa Lehulere’s aunt recalls from memory.
In Reddening of the Greens, the theme of movement and migration is carried through the installation of worn suitcases, wooden crutches and birdhouse assemblages made out of salvaged school desks. Explaining the significance of these materials and their multiple readings, Wa Lehulere recalls the journeys of German philosopher Walter Benjamin and South African writer Nat Nakasa, both of whom tragically committed suicide when in exile. Assembled together, the objects convey multiple meanings – the suitcases are representative of journeys but also displacement, while the crutch is interpreted as a means of support but also hindered progress. The incomplete birdhouses made of cut up school desks suggest the symbolic promises of freedom, and the failures of the institutions that govern, police, and educate us.
The installation Conference of the Birds is an assembly of sixteen bird-boxes constructed from salvaged school desks, interspersed with music stands, ceramic dogs, and paper scrolls, and surrounded by chalk boards protruding at angles from the walls. Taking its title from an album by the Dave Holland Quartet, Conference of the Birds is inspired by the 1993 Gatherings Act of South Africa, which allowed a maximum of fifteen protesters to gather without a permit: the sixteenth person makes the protest illegal. In addition to universal references to collectivity, freedom and peace, birds in Southern African folk tales can also allude to symbols of the female sex and gender conflicts, as well as mediators between the spiritual world and the material world. Universal symbols of instruction, the chalkboards are populated with drawings and sketches alluding to crowds of people, depicted as swarming masses of dots, or Xs in sequence. Here and there are portions of text, obliterated and obscured like the rolled up messages strewn about the floor. Through the use of these metaphors, the work speaks to ideas of connectedness, networks and communing. In South Africa, protests – often accompanied by song – are heavily policed. Though they are mass-produced as kitsch household ornaments, the presence of the ceramic Alsatian dogs in the installation is a reminder of ‘police dogs’ and the force of state violence that protesters were often met with during such gatherings.
Also included in the exhibition is a letter addressed to the Nobel Peace Prize committee. In it, Wa Lehulere appeals to the institution to retrospectively honour the late author Sol T. Plaatje with the unallocated 1914 award for his monumental work, Native Life in South Africa, which was written in response to the Native Land Act. Although the institution does not award the prize posthumously, Wa Lehulere nevertheless posits the importance of acknowledging Plaatje’s contributions to literature through his chronicling of the Black experience. In doing so, the artist attempts to intervene, or collaborate with time and history by proposing a redress of recognition for Plaatje’s oeuvre.
Curator and critic Khwezi Gule writes:
“Wa Lehulere’s work is not so much about history or histories but the points at which certain (historical) trajectories are interrupted on a personal level (exile, suicide) and a systemic socio-political level (forced removals, the Land Act), and the intersection of the two. In a sense, his practice explores how the historical does not just manifest in the personal but how the personal is constitutive of the historical. Another major theme running through the artist’s practice is the abortive attempt to suture, reassemble, to graft prostheses onto these interrupted narratives and trajectories. These become surrogates for what was lost in the ruptures. Aborted, though, because the act of grafting (new) histories on old injuries serves not to ameliorate or cover up the injury but to accentuate and deepen the sense of loss.”
Bring Back Lost Love is Wa Lehulere’s first exhibition with the gallery.
Exhibition press:
Blackman, M. Kemang Wa Lehulere Summons a Black Intellectual Tradition. ArtReview [online] (published 28 March 2023)
Moloi, N. Kemang Wa Lehulere at blank projects. Artforum, vol. 61, no. 9 (published May 2023)
