Locating the human face amid the urban chaos
It is only right that South Africans gripe about infrastructural decline (or its correlative lack of infrastructural development) in many of our urban environments. The state continues to betray its repeated promises in this regard. Yet in the necessary focus on buildings, pipelines, grids, networks and structures, our discourse sometimes seems to forget the people who inhabit the place.
Etymologically, cities are first and foremost constituted by citizens. The English word “city” comes from the Old French cité, which derives from the Latin civitas: a member of a community. Likewise, polis — as in the metropolis of Johannesburg, or the megalopolis that takes up most of Gauteng — was the ancient Greek term not for physical urban spaces but for the collective identity of a group or society.
This linguistic quirk provides a useful paradigm for interpreting the striking images in Mongezi Ncombo’s exhibition Pandemonic Clarity. Ncombo encourages us to see the human face of the urban chaos around us, and to celebrate its beauty.
In Ncombo’s pen drawings and linoprints, urban geometries merge with the circles, triangles and squares of portraiture. The effect is to convey a fusion of the cityscape and the human form. Intloko ye Khaya, for instance, shows “the head of the household”: a woman whose doek blends into the substructure of a large building, its grand but shaky columns echoed in the reach of multistorey constructions sketched alongside it. With its visual synecdochic pun, this work implies that the women of Johannesburg carry the weight of the city — the world — on their heads.
The women depicted in this way, however, are unbowed by their responsibility; they retain their dignity and even a hopeful bearing, reinforced by the title of Amandla okuzithemba (attesting to its subject’s strength and confidence). The tower crane and skyscraper in the background are also indicative of optimism, insofar as construction is an investment in the future of the city and its inhabitants.
The linoprint The land we landed on by chance employs the Hillbrow tower as its central vertical axis, Ncombo’s most explicit nod to the Johannesburg skyline. There is a pleasing symmetry along the work’s horizontal axis, suggesting an inverse, underground city — not literally subterranean, though this would be apt in a downtown honeycombed by mine shafts — but rather a
hidden or unrecognised way of life.
This is, presumably, the domain of the migrant: the “we” who have ended up in Joburg by chance or by design, from elsewhere in SA or across the continent or around the globe. These figures shadow or reflect the iconic skyline, becoming the struts holding it all up, the stays keeping it all together. There is a sense of dynamism here, a city that shimmers (and occasionally quakes). And there is also movement through time, with diagonal lines hinting at the hour marks on a clock face, counting the passing of each day through that day’s labour.
In bold counterpoint to these black-and-white images, the mixed media works in Pandemonic Clarity offer a riot of colour. Again, the subjects’ faces receive a form of geometric treatment, though the level of abstraction varies.
Lost in the picture is a somewhat troubling portrait: the darker reds and blues, the mouth agape, the angle of the brows all evoking some kind of distress. The cubist face in Repercussions is more pensive, or perhaps stoical the words KEEP CALM daubed in the centre of the image no longer a jokey meme reference but appearing instead to express grim determination. By contrast, If you like something presents a lighthearted and joyful scene, with children playing and dancing while more sombre adults look on.
Combining all these elements is the dense and ambiguous mixed media piece Lucid contortion. There is a face in the chaos here too, though it is the abstraction that impresses most — dark lines slashing across the canvas, piercing shards of colour and light. Slowly, the viewer’s eye is drawn to a kneeling figure at the side. Whether this person is paying obeisance or praying, seeking refuge, pleading for mercy or otherwise occupied in the mire, remains unclear.
Pandemonic Clarity is at the Firestation (16 Baker Street, Rosebank, Johannesburg) until February 29.