Wa Lehulere. Many of the ideas for these works
have their genesis in his earlier collaborations.
Like Kentridge, who had once belonged to
the Junction Avenue Theatre Company and later
studied mime in Paris, Wa Lehulere’s earliest
ambitions lay in acting. His interest in theatre was
sparked by the success of his actor cousin, Itumeleng.
Wa Lehulere graduated from doing radio voice-overs
and high-school plays to television and theatre.
Unlike Kentridge, however, who was born into a
patrician Jewish family, Wa Lehulere is of mixed race
and found this identity scuppered his acting career.
His nappy hair, brown eyes, ginger-tinted beard and
love for progressive jazz are an inheritance from his
jazz musician parents, Letsego Lehulere and David
McKibbin, the son of Irish missionaries.
The pair met through the tenor saxophonist
Winston ‘Mankunku’ Ngozi, but apartheid put paid
to any chances of them creating a life together in
South Africa, and McKibbin eventually moved abroad,
settling in England. Both of the artist’s parents
died before he was 12. He grew up with his aunt in
Gugulethu, a Xhosa township on the Cape Flats.
When his racial background and distinctive Xhosa
twang made him hard to cast in acting roles, he
became frustrated and decided to study film.
Wa Lehulere’s breakthrough work as a solo artist
was the three-minute video Lefu la Ntate (2005). Its
Xhosa title translates as ‘father’s death’. First exhibited
in 2006, the video shows a cigarette burning down
to its filter, in a mournful homage to McKibbin. While
pivotal, this early work didn’t generate much buzz.
Wa Lehulere continued to make short biographical
videos, and paint realist scenes of township life, until
the rekindling of a childhood association with artist
Unathi Sigenu – with whom he founded Gugulective –
radically shifted the foundations of his practice.
The epicentre of this bohemian collective of artists
and writers was Kwa Mlamli, a tavern in Gugulethu
where the group staged exhibitions in order to develop
what Wa Lehulere once described as the ‘vocabulary,
content and form’ of their work. Functionally, it meant
that he stopped painting. ‘We were very idealistic,’
he says of the group, which championed anti-colonial
practices. ‘I have become more suspicious of those
frames of thinking. I have come to realise that things
are much messier than they appear.’
Two works originating from this period – one
a performance, the other a sculptural intervention –
continue to influence his artistic practice. For three
days in 2008, Wa Lehulere devoted himself to digging
a hole in Kwa Mlamli’s backyard using only a comb.
This amateur archaeological dig yielded not only cow
bones, but also a new method of working that involves
scratching and digging for meaning below the surface
of things. His presentation at the Fondation Louis
Vuitton included a drawing scraped into the wall of
the museum. Wa Lehulere’s show at Marian Goodman,ABOVE LEFT, A ROPE MOBILE
FEATURING SAND-FILLED
BOTTLES AS BALLAST WAS
PARTLY INSPIRED BY SOUTH
AFRICAN ASTROPHYSICIST
THEBE MEDUPE’S RESEARCH
INTO AFRICA’S INTERACTIONS
WITH THE COSMOS
ABOVE RIGHT, A PERCUSSIVE
INSTRUMENT FASHIONED
FROM OLD SCHOOL DESKS,
CRUTCHES, SHOELACES AND
STEEL TUBING. IT IS SIMILAR
TO THOSE FEATURED IN
WA LEHULERE’S 2017 I CUT
MY SKIN TO LIBERATE THE
SPLINTER THEATRICAL PIECE,
FOR WHICH HE WON THE
MALCOLM MCLAREN AWARD
AT PERFORMA 17 IN NEW YORK
OPPOSITE, A LARGE
SCULPTURE MADE FROM
WOODEN DESKTOPS.
THE PLASTIC CASTS OF HAND
SIGNS WERE INSPIRED BY
RAMADAN SULEMAN’S 2004
FILM ZULU LOVE LETTERArt