Wa Lehuler
Although the artist is starting a whole a new conversation, he picks up on threads from his earlier shows and expands on them
When I was young I overheard a gangster threaten to kill someone who had kicked a stray dog, his logic was that dogs were ancestors. This would mean that the stray dogs in the townships were once black people who lived in those very townships or maybe elsewhere. What a way to live. Live like a dog and be recycled as a dog. If karma does have a dog then the curator of karma definitely has not only a lamentable but sadistic love for black people at large. — Kemang wa Lehulere, Letter 2 Reply (to Khwezi Gule)
Kemang wa Lehulere is tired in more ways than one a day after his opening at the Stevenson Gallery in Braamfontein. The exhaustion of celebrating the opening of his third solo show, The Knife Eats at Home, is compounded by what he terms “the fatigue of history”, an idea that runs through his work.
The exhibition, coinciding with the 40th anniversary of June 16, is, among other concerns, about the meaning of education. But, as the artist says, he wanted to uncover ways of “speaking differently about ourselves, not just as victims or survivors but as people who lived regardless of this moment”.
In honing this new conversation, Wa Lehulere returns to threads found in previous works of his such as History Will Break Your Heart, which is on show at the Standard Bank Gallery until Saturday, and To Whom It May Concern, his 2015 Stevenson solo show.
Using sculpture, paintings and drawings, Wa Lehulere creates purposeful yet luminously ambiguous work that is simultaneously playful, contemplative, mournful and, yes, horrific. Several installations mark the exhibition on the ground floor, the first of which is a parrot in a wooden box set up at eye level. A voice recording of an American English language tutorial (which the artist found in Bangkok in 2014) plays while the bird presumably “parrots it”.
Wa Lehulere says what we see is a failed attempt to bring a live bird into the gallery. Although the parrot is immobile and the tape drones instructions nonstop, his point is made with cunning intelligence, plugging into the conversation about the national broadcaster’s calls for a 90% quota of local content on all its stations.
“I was reflecting on South Africa, it’s so fucking American,” he says. “If you look at Braamfontein, that [Neighbourgoods] market is quite a Brooklyn thing. People are emulating things, which is not necessarily wrong, but when a culture dominates to the extent that it has been dominating in South Africa, I think that’s very wrong in my opinion.”
Having said that, the artist thinks little of the SABC’s chief operating officer, Hlaudi Motsoeneng, and his autocratic tactics. His point is that the damage has been done and will take a huge effort to undo.
Further into his exhibition, desks (another recurring motif) take the shape of paper planes, suggesting the paradoxical nature of life in a classroom — repressive but with moments of self-created transcendence.
Wa Lehulere translates this duality eloquently by, and his other installations speak back to this theme.
For instance, the exhibition sees the use of tyres with wooden crutches slotted within them — suggesting the way in which children use sticks to roll them along — to convey ideas of horror and playfulness. The tyres, simulating motion, stillness and abandonment, are watched by porcelain dogs, another motif that has appeared in several of the artist’s works, most recently in History Will Break Your Heart.
Dogs occupy an interesting corner of the artist’s imagination. For many South Africans, they convey ideas of repression and access but, Wa Lehulere told those who attended