ART OF LONELINESS
Cameroonian artist Joël Mpah Dooh understands our fragility
N his book Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace writes, “We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for.” A few days after reading that line I’m at Joburg’s Gallery Momo with Cameroonian artist Joël Mpah Dooh, walking through his latest exhibition, and the discussion is about loneliness.
“The sadness, the loneliness, the fragility of the human being,” says Mpah Dooh, pointing to a work.
It is a wire mesh sculpture of a lone figure with a suitcase, the figure apparently waiting for nothing but expecting something. Hundreds of pieces of string hang loosely above the figure, focusing all of time and space into that moment.
This work is one of many at the exhibition that portrays something Mpah Dooh experienced the last time he visited Joburg, in 2012. He missed his flight back to Cameroon and was held up at OR Tambo Airport for four days, legally unable to leave, sleeping on rows of chairs and surviving on snacks and restaurant food.
“I was in a space of nowhere, in a space between my country and South Africa,” Mpah Dooh says.
“I started thinking about how fragile we can be, how we can be having the same conversation about the same problem but every single person is on his own. People together but at the same time separate.”
Mpah Dooh throws his hands around plenty when he talks, almost to the point that the listener must employ boxer-style head-dodge moves to avoid connecting with his hands. He was a few minutes late for the interview because he was in Rosebank buying extra bags for the gifts and the books he’s collected during his two-month residency at Momo.
The exhibition is entitled “Since We Last Met” — a followup to his 2012 Momo show “Let’s Take a Walk”, which examined Joburg’s inner city, a place he’d heard so much about — good and bad — but could only fully understand by being there.
With this latest work, Mpah Dooh is meeting his audience once again and asking about the changes that have occurred both in himself and the viewer, and in the city, since his last visit.
“It’s like an open letter, to guide people to where I want them to be connected with me,” he says. “The truth of what I did, what I’ve seen, the way it affected me, what I’ve heard, what is inside me and connected to what people could feel themselves: the idea of being together and at the same time being fragile. We are all of us fragile.”
Many of the paintings in this exhibition have been done on aluminium, with parts of the material left visible, glinting and moving as you pass by. Mpah Dooh has been working with this surface for years.
Clocks feature prominently in the works, and this is not just as a homage to Mpah Dooh’s four-day purgatory in OR Tambo, it’s about the nature of time — how it is an inescapable thing that affects us all, how it is always the same, but how it also passes differently for everybody and in different stages or moments of one’s life.
It can be heavy (one work, Being Here Like Flowers, shows a man towing time in a rickshaw) or it can be light and almost unnoticeable. But it is always fragile. Threatening to get away from us, the cause of problems when we don’t have enough of it, and, of course, reminding us that each of us has their own lifetime’s allotment.
“This feeling is universal. It’s mine and yours,” says Mpah Dooh.
Here is where I paraphrase Foster Wallace, observing that most of us are waiting for something we’re not sure we’re waiting for.
Mpah Dooh goes, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. That is our whole lives, ha ha.”
“The individual on his own, but still together with others,” I say. “And how you can be in a crowd but still feel devastatingly alone.”
“Ya, ya, ya, ya,” Mpah Dooh says, flailing those Francofied hands about again, me ducking every which way.
‘Since We Last Met’ is on at Gallery Momo, Parktown North, Joburg, until November 28. www.gallerymomo.com