I’m an archivist but I never look back
● Banele Khoza and I last spoke during the height of the lockdown via the ubiquitous Zoom.
Um, ja! I wholeheartedly agree when he says “I am really excited to have an in-person conversation”. It doesn’t get old, this in-person stuff.
We meet at his favourite Italian. Everyone has their own. Il Contadino is his go-to place and I can see why — a bright Parktown North joint that used to be the corner café and still retains some of that bonhomie and earthy simplicity. Plus pavement tables.
He orders the same dish he’s had at least 18 times here — the butternut gnocchi — and says the place reminds him of his personality. “Very thorough and at the same time very understated.”
Again I must agree because Banele has a lot to show for his tender 29 years. He is kind and understated.
He’s just back from his opening in Germany at the Kunsthaus Göttingen, a new art museum dedicated to paper. The inaugural exhibition also featured the work of Santu Mofokeng and William Kentridge. Illustrious company, then.
“It was such a great opportunity to be showing alongside Santu and William, but half the time I felt like an impostor as these are such art legends in SA.”
The exhibition is on until May. It began as a conversation between Banele, Lunetta Bartz, who was a close collaborator of Mofokeng’s and Kentridge’s, and the curator, New York-based Joshua Chuang.
“I knew it was a great opportunity and I could trust the process. But I didn’t have a full picture of Steidl.”
He is talking about Gerhard Steidl, quite possibly the world’s most renowned publisher you’ve never heard of — unless you are a top-flight artist or photographer. He was also Karl Lagerfeld’s unfailing daily phone call while he was alive.
He prints the most marvellous, tactile books that are works of art themselves. The museum is connected to the publishing press.
“The guests and artists who travel from all over the world just to hang out with him are mind-blowing. In the courtyard of the museum is a Jim Dine installation, also for the inaugural exhibition, and I hung out at his daily lunch meetings with Juergen Teller and his wife. The thoroughness of the process is very satisfying. I showed a body of work from 2013 up to this present moment. But the anchor was my diaries. I have been doing them since 2008. I started as a schoolboy in grade 10 when I had left Swaziland, my family and my friends, and it is the only way I can structure my thoughts. My diary practice has been completely dissociated from my commercial art practice.”
He writes every day, always in a Moleskine and with a very specific pen, the Unipen. “It never seeps through the pages. I did not realise I was archiving — I can look back and reference, but I never look back; I write it and then I put it away.
Steidl has a hot lunch every day. “It was interesting, at 1 o’clock everyone would prepare to go for lunch — there are always six guests and Steidl. He has a private chef. What was special is that he reminded me of my father in his mannerisms. Some people can be intimidated by him but for me it felt very familiar.
“The one question I asked that surprised people was what keeps him going. It is his passion for the printing process. I was about to work with Chanel at our gallery (BKhz) and so I discuss his work with Karl Lagerfeld; and to see his presence in the publishing house was one of the best parts of being there. Steidl shared insights into their working process — they were best friends and spoke every day.
“I really needed this exhibition. It brought perspective of who I could be in the future — sometimes you are so immersed in your reality you can’t see the future, especially in the last two years immersed in Covid, I was not feeling so confident.”
Now he is travelling practically every week until June. “Tomorrow I leave for Cape Town, then Amsterdam, Paris — I have a show coming up in Paris and we are discussing a residency. Then I have a fellowship in New York which is finally happening — it was meant to be 2020, then lockdown happened.”
He grounds himself at his studio in Durban; he has another in Pretoria. “What people sometimes think about art is that it has to be about a big idea. But it is actually about the everyday. What people miss is that you just have to turn up every day and be present in the simple tasks, like washing dishes. It helps to process your emotions. That is what Durban helps — it is 45 minutes away and you can immediately be at the ocean. It is a place I can calm and centre myself.”
How is he viewing the world now, particularly after the death of his father last year? “I have learnt a sense of trust in myself. I think very often you don’t realise that. It felt like a lot of people had trust in me and I did not have trust in myself. But now seeing that I can have an idea and I can execute it is very empowering. Essentially, now I believe that whatever I set my mind to I can achieve. Once you tap into that energy it is almost spiritual. It is potentially what we all are — infinite beings. In relation to death, anything you can do, do it today.”