however, highlights his sensibilities as a sculptor.
School desks are a resonant material. The wooden tops
frequently bear traces of individual assertion (first
names) and juvenile desire (images of genitalia). But
the school desks also invoke a collective history of
revolt. South Africa’s universities have been agitated
centres of anti-colonial activism since 2015. Further
back in time, one of Wa Lehulere’s aunts was shot in
the head during the 1976 student uprising that gripped
the country. This melding of personal biography and
collective history is integral to how Wa Lehulere works
as an artist. But this is not a new insight.
Far less acknowledged is the way Wa Lehulere’s work
is energised by ideas familiar to theatre (choreography,
set design, narrative) and jazz (repetition). His studio
is equal parts workshop and prop house. It is here that
Wa Lehulere transforms school desks into sculptural
pieces, makes plastic casts of hand signs – inspired by
Ramadan Suleman’s 2004 film Zulu Love Letter, about
a black journalist’s troubled relationship with her past
and her deaf daughter – and stores the ceramic dogs
that appear in many of his installations.
Decorative kitsch sourced in Johannesburg, the dogs
are a literal if oblique reference to writer RRR Dhlomo’s
1930 short story The Dog Killers, about the cruelties
exerted on men and animals in the country’s gold
mines. Along with his large chalk wall drawings
combining image and text, the dogs and school desks
are now a signature aspect of Wa Lehulere’s work and
featured in his theatrical piece I cut my skin to liberate the
splinter (2017), partly inspired by astrophysicist Thebe
Medupe’s investigations into African conceptions of
the cosmos. The set design also incorporated car tyres
and suitcases with grass, while the performance
included Wa Lehulere and his collaborators using
his wooden sculptures as percussive instruments.
This evocative gesture grew out of a conversation
with his long-time collaborator, the actress and theatre
director Chuma Sopotela, about the possibility of
somehow animating his static sculptures. His new work
in London continues this investigation into aspects
of African history and ideas of time. ‘I am interested
in how history lives in the present,’ Wa Lehulere told
curator Britta Färber in 2016 while preparing for a solo
exhibition in Berlin. ‘While something is historical, it
is not necessarily something that belongs to the past.’
This idea continues to engage the artist. ‘For me, time
is elastic,’ he says. ‘We live in the past, the present
and the future at the same time, whether we like to
acknowledge it or not.’ ∂
Kemang Wa Lehulere’s ‘Not even the departed stay grounded’
is showing at the Marian Goodman Gallery, London W1,
13 September-20 October, mariangoodman.com‘Time is elastic: we live in the past, the
present and the future at the same time’
∑ 217