ART
Remembering our heroes
What is a hero? What makes us pick one over another? What is it about a hero that makes us stand up and take note and then admire, adore or try to emulate them? Why do particular heroes populate our history books while others are left out? Do we need and therefore create our heroes? Who gets memorialised and who is forgotten?
These are the kinds of questions that artist Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi asks in her series, Heroes, an ongoing inquiry into the subjective nature of the term.
“It’s an ongoing personal gesture of remembering and memorialising,” says Nkosi. “A kind of self-portrait created out of the sequence of images of the people who have had an influence on my life. It’s an attempt to answer the question ‘who am I?’ with reference to the people I look up to.”
‘‘The work is also an interrogation of history. Who writes history, who gets to choose the heroes and who gets left out of history.”
Portraits in history
Nkosi was born in New York, daughter of a South African father in exile and a Greek mother. She received her master’s in fine art from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her painting tutor was British painter Martin Maloney.
The artist employs a particular, intentional style. Toned down and flat, her portraits of familiar faces, reference both the “icon” and the “nobody”. Her faces are masklike and yet celebratory, expressionless — almost death-like — and yet archetypal.
She has intentionally chosen the portrait as her medium. “Portraiture has a long history in western practice and I want to comment on that too.” Rather than showing individualistic characteristics, most early portraits were intended to idealise rulers and important people, removing flaws and details to create a flat, icon-like image. Official portraits have historically been a record of important personalities, notably kings, presidents and governors. By playing with the idea of who the traditional subject matter of the portrait has been, Nkosi is also commenting on the creation of the myth of the hero.
We could be heroes
But, by playing with size and what the scale of the artwork says about its subject, the artist also says something else about the hero. “These are 50 x 50 works,” she says. “They are created in a format that’s meant to be reminiscent of ID photos — standardised, democratised, a picture that doesn’t say much about you or reflect anything about who you really are. This is the antithesis of what we understand a hero to be. The picture ID format is a representation of anyone, not anyone special.”
‘‘So there is a push and pull — a democratising of the important that makes us reconsider the images again.”
Nkosi is careful to point out that she doesn’t think that her choice of heroes should be definitive. “My art is interactive,” she insists. “I want other artists and the public to weigh in, discuss, comment, agree and disagree. My paintings are only the starting point for a much more in-depth discussion.”
To this end, Nkosi has collaborated with the duo Alphabet Zoo, Joburg-based traditional printmaking artists Minekulu Ngoyi and Isaac Zavale. The two have launched a street-culture zine that invites collaboration from other young talented artists, illustrators, publishers and designers.
With Alphabet Zoo Nkosi is initiating a series of workshops in which artists respond to Nkosi’s portraits in various forms, creating new readings of the work. Participating artists include Andile Buka, Simnikiwe Buhlungu, Mooki Mooks, Kgomotso Neto Tleane, Jack Diamond, and the Danger Gevaar Ingozi collective.
Show us the heroes
So who are the heroes in Nkosi’s work? Taxi driver Emidio Macia, author Bessie Head, activist Winnie Mandela, soccer player Jabu Mahlangu (formerly Pule) and rape victim Anene Booysen are some.
Visitors to The Reading Room at the GoetheInstitut Johannesburg are invited to observe the development of the space over the project period. They will also be invited to engage directly with the artists’ processes — including opportunities to participate in a programme of workshops and public events. The idea is that what is generated in the space will build on the narratives already present, and populate The Reading Room with a multiplicity of voices.