Amira’s political take on Ghana
LHOLA AMIRA “entered” the South African art scene in 2009 and has been an active thinker in engaging with the way black women are perceived in society – “as hyper visible or invisible” – as she puts it.
The idea that black women are either ignored or conversely objectified and exotisised as though their existence functions as a performance is a difficult reality to engage with, especially if you are what is termed a “performance artist”.
Amira does this by rejecting performance itself as an artistic medium and instead opts to use social, conversational, everyday engagements in her fleeting appearances. She departs from the approaches of artists like Athi-Patra Ruga or Steven Cohen through her pre-occupation with what might unfold when a black woman insists on being seen, but refuses to perform.
So while she is charismatic, knowledgeable and glamorous – she is typically fashionably dressed, wears lipstick and high heels – she denies the label “performer”.
In her current exhibition Looking For Ghana & The Red Suitcase, showing at SMAC Gallery in Stellenbosch, Amira presents documentation of her travels and her political take on it in Ghana using photography, video and installation, as well through dialogue with her viewers.
Amira is an artist who “shares her body” with curator Khanyisile Mbongwa. That is to say, Lhola is the alter-ego of Mbongwa, who is currently studying for her master’s in Performance Art, Public Art and Public Sphere through the University of Cape Town-associated Institute of Creative Arts.
Mbongwa’s artistic involvement beyond curatorship consists in part of working with collectives – Gugulective in the past, and currently with Vasiki Creative Citizens. She views creative practice as a mode of activism.
Lhola Amira’s career path continues this line but she is currently a solo artist, guided by, and in conversation with her “maker” – Mbongwa. It is hard to divide a line between the two. We might then be tempted to think of curator Mbongwa as informing Amira’s practice, even though Amira, described as an organic being, prefers to speak for herself. The two voices in conversation bring up interesting, if sometimes conflicting ideas.
In the case of Looking For Ghana… the separation between Lhola’s art practice – photography, video, installation – and who she is as a person is glaring. Her images are dramatic, striking and carefully composed, using a different language of communication than Lhola does in person, which is more relational and less staged.
So while Lhola, striking and glamorous, but still just herself, simply surfaces at different moments, it is arguable whether or not the images she presents capture these appearances, or in fact perform them. However, as Mbongwa says: “You can’t perform the thing you are” – and so we could also view these discrepancies between Amira’s art objects and Amira as describing the very same discrepancy between any artist and their work.
The journey of Amira is described by Mbongwa as one of “consistent deconstruction” that moves according to the politics of the time and results in living a “plural existence”, that is in some way representative of the continued survival of black people under ruthless colonialism and new expressions of inequality.
Through this insistence on plurality – expressed through this curious existence of two selves – Amira challenges western norms of art, particularly its reliance on the artist as individual. A complex character to say the least, Amira’s aim does not seem to be preoccupied with a watertight and unchanging self-definition. She is in constant motion.
Looking For Ghana & The Red Suitcase explores, defines and imagines the idea of “Africa” according to Amira’s own experience, rather than through anyone else’s eyes. The exhibition documents her seemingly counter-intuitive process of searching for this forced perception of “Africa” within an African country, and in doing so, debunking myths around our continent as being homogenous.
Additionally, it speaks to Amira’s curiosity and hunger for engagement, understanding and ultimately, for knowledge about the continent and its present history.
This was evident through her appearance at the opening, as an engaged party and a “viewer” in her own right who observed her own work, conversing and playing with everyday interaction and conversation as an artistic medium.
She walked through the installation of e-waste and unlit matchsticks and talked to the people in the room, referring to aspects of the contemporary Ghanaian situation that raise questions around global capitalism and its bond with racism, patriarchy, and how these operate in relation to colonialism and decolonisation.
Amira takes on a new character than that of Khanyisile, and while approachable, interested in conversation and keen on sharing knowledge and ideas, there is a certain distance about her that is not shared by Mbongwa; she is insightful, with an irresistible mystique.
Amira is interested in travelling in Ghana as it is “the first sub-Saharan country to demand independence from colonialism”.
Mbongwa questions whether perhaps this failed model is just “what decolonisation looks like”, implying that to address the consistently morphing shape of inequality, we need new site-specific ideas and solutions that exist completely outside of the colonial paradigm.
Mbongwa rejects the “romanticised notion of dying for a revolution”, in favour of embracing and centering the existence of the self (Amira), as she examines the reality of the neo-colonial situation many have given their lives for.
As she moved around the installation, she talked about exploitation of Ghana in the present day, which since independence is used as a dumping ground for the West’s e-waste. Moving innocently between the roles of a self-assured conversationalist and informant, the pieces of loaded knowledge she offers us between normal conversation position her more accurately as a covert revolutionary.
It is through these engagements in various spaces that she seeks to affirm the subjectivity of both black people and the African continent.
In using a visual language that differs greatly from her conversational and social style, we can question the effectiveness of the delivery of Amira’s message, but can hardly argue that her approach is not fascinating and incredibly challenging.
"Looking For Ghana & The Red Suitcase’” shows at Smac Gallery in Stellenbosch until April 1.