A set of regular wooden battens rises from a seemingly mechanical base, its components arranged in pairs along a semicircular arc to form a curved, fan-like structure. Salvaged from used school desks, each batten has multiple perforations across its surface and idiosyncratic colour patterns that zigzag in shades of blue, black, pink, green, white, and yellow; a palette inspired by the colourful remnants of dried bubblegum found on and under these desks. This describes No Witchcraft for Sale, a wall-based sculpture titled after the short story by Doris Lessing, whose protagonist represents a figure of resistance against the colonial exploitation of traditional knowledge. Often drawing inspiration from literary references, Kemang Wa Lehulere is known for recontextualising found materials and objects in his sculptures and installations, spotlighting their embedded memories, histories, and associations with a critical bent. In No Witchcraft for Sale, for example, each painted length of wood both differs from and supports the ensemble’s identity through variegated colours and patterns. This points to a recurrent pattern in the artist’s practice: how individual experiences connect to larger, collective histories while also reflecting the social strains that tend to exist between personal and communal memory.
Love Letters Written in Poisonous Ink is the artist’s third solo show with blank projects, one that continues the artist’s experimentation with transforming everyday objects into art. That is, not only to change their nature by destroying their familiarity but also to stretch their materiality itself beyond its ordinary disposition. The underlying rationale is more conceptual than biographical. At heart, Wa Lehulere is an artist with a conceptual impulse, albeit not in the sense of placing art at the threshold of information. Instead, his is “a sort of mindful idolatry of the idea,” to invoke art critic Colin Richards, often mining repositories of knowledge production with interest and circumspection. This conceptualist attitude is not limited to serving as a corrective to the anti-referential, inward-looking conception of art by valorizing ideas over materiality. But, as Richards also argues, there is a dialectic between craft and conceptualism in South African art, a condition greatly shaped by the disparate material and political conditions that have existed and persist. Here, the uncertainty of memory, the fickleness of the archive, and the resourcefulness of the mundane become sites for creative prying and digging. Love Letters seeks to momentarily deviate from leading with ideas; instead, it considers materiality as its departure point. To invert Richards’ formulation: the thing comes to think.
Like the titles of his previous shows, Love Letters Written in Poisonous Ink adopts a poetic, oblique, and tentative approach rather than a descriptive one, inviting the viewer to ponder what the wood and steel of the salvaged school desks might suggest about love, literature, and precarity. Here, he reintroduces these materials to explore the original objects anew, dismantling them entirely and applying a coat of enamel paint; an unusual approach in the artist’s practice. Wa Lehulere had first employed these apartheid-era school desks in conjunction with calls for decolonization as a metonym for segregated schooling, stunted pupilage, and the state’s disciplinary drive to produce docile bodies. As he once said, these desks represented “something that would evoke a particular history...” However, in this show, the artist turns to the particularity of the material itself, allowing it, so to speak, to conjure new, wayward forms. Visually, his works blur the boundary between sculptures and paintings, perhaps just as they destabilize the disparities between figuration and abstraction.
Among black South African artists, from Ernest Mancoba to David Koloane, this bifurcation of subject matter rarely calcifies into rigid, incompatible lines. Mancoba, a veritable symbol of African abstract expression and a figure of critical interest to Wa Lehulere’s work, has stated: “[o]ur history has brought about, little by little, this dichotomy between abstraction and figuration, which provokes, more and more, a terrible atomization in the very essence of life.” Likewise, Wa Lehulere’s leaning into nonrepresentational forms is no less shaped by, and responsive to, the political conditions that underwrite the materiality. Thus, a narrow, purist reading of the exhibition’s tangentially abstract works risks the mistake of ignoring the legible if ideologically embedded features offered by their titles, suggestive shapes, and writerly traces. Instead, a productive tension emerges. This marks a deviation from aesthetic and epistemological purism, and what Huey Copeland describes as a form of “tending-toward-blackness”, “aimed at establishing an ethical posture toward black subjects and those related forms of being that have been positioned at the margins of thought and perception.”
While sculptural paintings hold a notable place in contemporary art, Wa Lehulere’s objects seem to diverge from the predominantly figural focus characterising this trend. The desks’ vandalistic graffiti, stains, and signs of previous use are the errant traces of human life, as shown in Kgotla, a circular structure evoking the architecture of the kraal. Among African cultures, kraals aren’t just cattle enclaves; they are also sacred gathering places where traditions are observed, and various family negotiations and ancestral appeals are entertained. In his sculptural assemblages, the artist uses layering as an anchoring technique, which at times generates strange illusions of foreground and background. In other works, while discernible, the superimposition of wood is less suggestive than in others. Take The Choir, a quintet of mainly wood and steel instruments with mask-like countenances. The wall arrangement feigns the structure of a choir, with each piece distinguished by colour while maintaining the same regular structure. The usual setup includes painted strips made of two conjoined ‘birdhouse’ silhouettes, placed on a wooden bed connected to a steel rod, which curves into a trapezoidal shape. It is adorned with vibrant satin ribbons tied around bright and circular wooden frills. The overall structure of each piece borrows its visage and theatricality from African masking traditions and invokes sound not only through the ensemblic arrangement but also materially, through the flamboyant, percussive-like frills hanging down like a bead curtain.
In the accompanying sound installation, The Ground is Emotional, questions about love are inferred: the sound cuts between recordings of voicemails, classic African choir compositions, and interviews with African traditional healers, who are asked whether their promises to bring back lost love can also return stolen land to the dispossessed. The audio is projected from speakers housed in wooden enclosures that surround a circular structure composed of birdhouses stacked together, all situated on the floor. There is a humanoid quality to their arrangement, a peculiar trait that quietly, if distantly, permeates even the most abstracted pieces. Or how else does one explain the anthropomorphism in their titles? The opening song is a composition by Reuben Caluza titled Silusapho Lase Africa, a woeful lament about the 1913 Native Land Act, which the ANC adopted at its founding.The pain of ending a relationship can be eased by another chance at love; even while death is traumatic, we are comforted by its inevitability. But what is the antidote to dispossession, being unsovereign, and a melancholic loss of ontological proportions?
Another assemblage, Luyolo Village (Simonstown), recalls the memory of the 1960s forced removals of black residents who were legally evicted from the picturesque, sea-facing location in Simonstown and relocated to the barren streets of Gugulethu. Luyolo Village’s roots trace back to the 1890s, when it was founded and populated by various migrant communities, including sailors from West African countries. In the sculpture, wooden birdhouses are uniformly layered atop one another, each with a hole in the middle. Some of these blocks face upside down. Behind, enamel-coated planks radiate like sunrises (or sunsets). The hermetic and overly simplistic construction of these birdhouses in the foreground not only resembles the low-cost housing structures of Luyolo Village but also recalls the crude, jam-packed lodgings depicted in several paintings by Gladys Mgudlandlu–the primary synecdoche of the bird motif. Today, however, there is no physical sign that this place ever existed; former residents still endure the painful reality and memories of a loss that exists as a historical gain for the colonial other.
There are also moments of seeming joviality and play among these objects, moments of sheer whimsy, as shown in pieces like Sometimes I Remember My Dreams, which inverts the visual order of Luyolo Village by placing the birdhouses against the wall and the splayed planks in the foreground, or Sunshine Shine, in which a circular arrangement of strips is overlaid with a veil of intricate black patterns. Behind the circular configuration, the block of birdhouses also form a base structure, as if emerging from the rays of a blackened sun. Moments like these, of blocking and inversion, recur throughout the artist’s larger body of work as instantiations of erasure, deletion, and contestation of both memory and the archive.
Love Letters Written in Poisonous Ink is the artist’s third solo show with blank projects, one that continues the artist’s experimentation with transforming everyday objects into art. That is, not only to change their nature by destroying their familiarity but also to stretch their materiality itself beyond its ordinary disposition. The underlying rationale is more conceptual than biographical. At heart, Wa Lehulere is an artist with a conceptual impulse, albeit not in the sense of placing art at the threshold of information. Instead, his is “a sort of mindful idolatry of the idea,” to invoke art critic Colin Richards, often mining repositories of knowledge production with interest and circumspection. This conceptualist attitude is not limited to serving as a corrective to the anti-referential, inward-looking conception of art by valorizing ideas over materiality. But, as Richards also argues, there is a dialectic between craft and conceptualism in South African art, a condition greatly shaped by the disparate material and political conditions that have existed and persist. Here, the uncertainty of memory, the fickleness of the archive, and the resourcefulness of the mundane become sites for creative prying and digging. Love Letters seeks to momentarily deviate from leading with ideas; instead, it considers materiality as its departure point. To invert Richards’ formulation: the thing comes to think.
Like the titles of his previous shows, Love Letters Written in Poisonous Ink adopts a poetic, oblique, and tentative approach rather than a descriptive one, inviting the viewer to ponder what the wood and steel of the salvaged school desks might suggest about love, literature, and precarity. Here, he reintroduces these materials to explore the original objects anew, dismantling them entirely and applying a coat of enamel paint; an unusual approach in the artist’s practice. Wa Lehulere had first employed these apartheid-era school desks in conjunction with calls for decolonization as a metonym for segregated schooling, stunted pupilage, and the state’s disciplinary drive to produce docile bodies. As he once said, these desks represented “something that would evoke a particular history...” However, in this show, the artist turns to the particularity of the material itself, allowing it, so to speak, to conjure new, wayward forms. Visually, his works blur the boundary between sculptures and paintings, perhaps just as they destabilize the disparities between figuration and abstraction.
Among black South African artists, from Ernest Mancoba to David Koloane, this bifurcation of subject matter rarely calcifies into rigid, incompatible lines. Mancoba, a veritable symbol of African abstract expression and a figure of critical interest to Wa Lehulere’s work, has stated: “[o]ur history has brought about, little by little, this dichotomy between abstraction and figuration, which provokes, more and more, a terrible atomization in the very essence of life.” Likewise, Wa Lehulere’s leaning into nonrepresentational forms is no less shaped by, and responsive to, the political conditions that underwrite the materiality. Thus, a narrow, purist reading of the exhibition’s tangentially abstract works risks the mistake of ignoring the legible if ideologically embedded features offered by their titles, suggestive shapes, and writerly traces. Instead, a productive tension emerges. This marks a deviation from aesthetic and epistemological purism, and what Huey Copeland describes as a form of “tending-toward-blackness”, “aimed at establishing an ethical posture toward black subjects and those related forms of being that have been positioned at the margins of thought and perception.”
While sculptural paintings hold a notable place in contemporary art, Wa Lehulere’s objects seem to diverge from the predominantly figural focus characterising this trend. The desks’ vandalistic graffiti, stains, and signs of previous use are the errant traces of human life, as shown in Kgotla, a circular structure evoking the architecture of the kraal. Among African cultures, kraals aren’t just cattle enclaves; they are also sacred gathering places where traditions are observed, and various family negotiations and ancestral appeals are entertained. In his sculptural assemblages, the artist uses layering as an anchoring technique, which at times generates strange illusions of foreground and background. In other works, while discernible, the superimposition of wood is less suggestive than in others. Take The Choir, a quintet of mainly wood and steel instruments with mask-like countenances. The wall arrangement feigns the structure of a choir, with each piece distinguished by colour while maintaining the same regular structure. The usual setup includes painted strips made of two conjoined ‘birdhouse’ silhouettes, placed on a wooden bed connected to a steel rod, which curves into a trapezoidal shape. It is adorned with vibrant satin ribbons tied around bright and circular wooden frills. The overall structure of each piece borrows its visage and theatricality from African masking traditions and invokes sound not only through the ensemblic arrangement but also materially, through the flamboyant, percussive-like frills hanging down like a bead curtain.
In the accompanying sound installation, The Ground is Emotional, questions about love are inferred: the sound cuts between recordings of voicemails, classic African choir compositions, and interviews with African traditional healers, who are asked whether their promises to bring back lost love can also return stolen land to the dispossessed. The audio is projected from speakers housed in wooden enclosures that surround a circular structure composed of birdhouses stacked together, all situated on the floor. There is a humanoid quality to their arrangement, a peculiar trait that quietly, if distantly, permeates even the most abstracted pieces. Or how else does one explain the anthropomorphism in their titles? The opening song is a composition by Reuben Caluza titled Silusapho Lase Africa, a woeful lament about the 1913 Native Land Act, which the ANC adopted at its founding.The pain of ending a relationship can be eased by another chance at love; even while death is traumatic, we are comforted by its inevitability. But what is the antidote to dispossession, being unsovereign, and a melancholic loss of ontological proportions?
Another assemblage, Luyolo Village (Simonstown), recalls the memory of the 1960s forced removals of black residents who were legally evicted from the picturesque, sea-facing location in Simonstown and relocated to the barren streets of Gugulethu. Luyolo Village’s roots trace back to the 1890s, when it was founded and populated by various migrant communities, including sailors from West African countries. In the sculpture, wooden birdhouses are uniformly layered atop one another, each with a hole in the middle. Some of these blocks face upside down. Behind, enamel-coated planks radiate like sunrises (or sunsets). The hermetic and overly simplistic construction of these birdhouses in the foreground not only resembles the low-cost housing structures of Luyolo Village but also recalls the crude, jam-packed lodgings depicted in several paintings by Gladys Mgudlandlu–the primary synecdoche of the bird motif. Today, however, there is no physical sign that this place ever existed; former residents still endure the painful reality and memories of a loss that exists as a historical gain for the colonial other.
There are also moments of seeming joviality and play among these objects, moments of sheer whimsy, as shown in pieces like Sometimes I Remember My Dreams, which inverts the visual order of Luyolo Village by placing the birdhouses against the wall and the splayed planks in the foreground, or Sunshine Shine, in which a circular arrangement of strips is overlaid with a veil of intricate black patterns. Behind the circular configuration, the block of birdhouses also form a base structure, as if emerging from the rays of a blackened sun. Moments like these, of blocking and inversion, recur throughout the artist’s larger body of work as instantiations of erasure, deletion, and contestation of both memory and the archive.
