Artist ensures lost art paints a new narrative History will bring tears to your eyes in Kemang wa Lehulere’s exhibition at the National Arts Festival, writes Theresa Smith
TheDog Monument Gallery.
The installation is in the middle of the space and deliberately fractures the narrative of the rest of the exhibition, “as a response to the structured nature of our history”, says Wa Lehulere.
Upon entering the gallery, you first watch a video of what turns out to be the last digital record of artist Ernest Mancoba. Wa Lehulere was given the raw footage shot in 2002 by an European art curator, a few months before a “really old and fragile” Mancoba died.
South African-born Mancoba was an avant-garde artist who spent most of his life in Europe. Today he is considered one of South Africa’s first professional black modern artists.
Though part of the European avant guard movement, Mancoba was largely written out of their history: “There’s a sadness in him speaking at the age of 98,” Wa Lehulere describes the footage.
“It (the video) is a collaboration with history, and an intergenerational conversation between myself and an older artist.
Wa Lehulere’s other idea was to highlight a forgotten black South African female artist, Gladys Mgudlandlu – his aunt, Sophia wa Lehulere, told him about her.
A neighbour in Gugulethu gave him a book that had belonged to Mgudlandlu which led to a conversation with his aunt. She spoke fondly of Mgudlandlu, remembering that in the ’60s the artist’s house was painted in a mural.
A teacher and self-taught artist, Mgudlandlu successfully exhibited for 10 years up to 1971, creating her own unique African expressionist style.
“We didn’t know it as art. We saw it as meaningless,” Sophia wa Lehulere says in the video.
Wa Lehulere brought in an art restorer after securing permission from the house’s owner, who gave it on condition they return the wall to its former state. After a painstaking process they discovered an image of a bird under many layers of paint.
Wa Lehulere has been working with chalk murals for years: “They disappear at the end of the exhibition and they can never be recreated.
“So, using the chalk murals now in the paintings on the wall is part symbolic and part frustration at never having encountered Gladys or Ernest in fine arts lectures at university.
“These drawings speak to images that are erased and marginalised from history.”
He discovered two of Mgudlandlu’s works at a London auction and for the exhibition staged his untrained-in-art aunt’s recreation of her memories of the art in chalk next to the Mgudlandlu paintings.
Back in the day, Mgudlandlu’s work was considered contentious, with writer Bessie Head describing the artist’s work as “escapist”.
“She was self-taught in terms of her outlook. So, for me that’s that other thing that drew me. No-one engages with her work, they engage with her biography, not what she was doing.
“In her work you see a desire for something else, to shut out the reality she was living in.”
“Gladys refused the party political image and Ernest left (South Africa) because of this expectation that he had to do black art like paint cows,” says Wa Lehulere.
HistoryWillBreakYourHeart travels to Port Elizabeth from the end of July to September; and will be in Cape Town from November 9 to January 2016.