Zwelethu Mthethwa - Is this our goal? and other related issues... by Everard Read Gallery

Is it our goal …? and other related issues Photographs and pastel works by

Zwelethu Mthethwa Page 1 MaDlamini out bound to the Meat Market (detail) 2010 pastel on cotton paper 107 x 150 cm

3 J U N E TO 3 0 J U N E 2 0 1 0

BIOGRAPHY Zwelethu Mthethwa was born in 1960 in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. Selected General and Academic Achievements 2005 Commissioned for the International Absolut Collection Elected on to the Association for Visual Arts Executive Committee 1998 Panelist, National Arts Council Nominated for the Vita Awards 1996 Vice-Chairman of the Association for Visual Arts and convenor of its Selection Committee Committee member of the Friends of the SA National Gallery 1995 Vice-Chairman of the SA Association of Arts (Western Cape) 1993 Won the City of Abijan prize, Biennale (Ivory Coast). Won the Bertrams VO Award 1987 Won a Fulbright Scholarship to study in the USA, Rochester Institute of Technology 1985 Won the Irma Stern Scholarship 1984 Awarded the Class Medal for graduation with a distinction in the Fine Arts Department (UCT) 1981 Awarded the Simon Gerson Prize for the most promising art student (UCT) Solo Exhibitions since 2000 2010 Is it our goal …? and other related issues. At CIRCA on Jellicoe, Johannesburg, South Africa Studio Museum in Harlem, New York Zwelethu Mthethwa at iArt Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa 2009 New Works, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York 2008 Children of a Lesser God, Everard Read, Johannesburg Contemporary Gladiators, Andréhn Schiptjenko, Stockholm 2007 Private-Public Spaces, Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris Recent Works, Galerie Oliva Arauna, Madrid Maidens and Dance of Life, Christine König, Vienna, in cooperation with Galerie Hengevoss-Dürkop 2006 Gold Miners, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York New Works, Everard Read, Johannesburg, South Africa Maidens, Galerie Hengevoss-Dürkop, Hamburg, Germany 2005 Women in Private Spaces, Andréhn-Schiptjenko Gallery, Stockholm Ticket to the Other Side, Gallery Hengevoss-Dürkop, Hamburg 2004 Harvesting Workers, Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA Lines of Negotiation, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York New Works, Association for Visual Arts, Cape Town 2003 New Works, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York Interior Portraits: Zwelethu Mthethwa Photographs, The Cleveland Museum of Art, OH Hamburg Kunsthalle, Galerie der Gegenwart, Hamburg 2002 Marco Noire Contemporary Art, San Sebastiano, Italy Museum of Contemporary Art, St Louis, MO Galerie Hengevoss, Hamburg 2001 Private Spaces, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg Galerie Jensen, Hamburg Centre National de la Photographie, curated by Regis Durand, Paris Mother & Child, Marco Noire Contemporary Art, San Sebastiano, Italy 2000 Jack Shainman Gallery, New York Galerie Hengevos and Jensen, part of the Triennale der Photographie, Hamburg

Selected Group Exhibitions since 2000 2010 Africa. Objects and Subject, Palacio de Revillagigedo, Gijón, Spain Africa. Objects and Subjects, Canal de Isabel II, Madrid, Spain A Collective Diary, An African Contemporary Journey Herzliya Museum for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel, curated by Simon Njami Always Moving Forward: Contemporary African Photography from the Wedge Collection, Gallery 44, Houston, TX The Walther Collection, curated by Okwui Enwezor Burlafingen, Germany 2009 Prospect 1 New Orleans, New Orleans, LA Sordid and Sacred: The Beggars in Rembrandt’s Etchings, Reynolds Gallery, Westmont College, Santa Barbara, CA Beyond The Familiar: Photography and the Construction of Community, Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA Cross-Currents in Recent Video Installation: Water as Metaphor for Identity, Tufts University Art Gallery, Medford, MA travelling to: Williams College Museum of Art, MA Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor Rethinking Landscape: Photography from the Collection of Allen Thomas Jr, Roanoke Museum, VA Sharing Territories, 5th Soa Tome Biennale, curated by Adelaide Ginga, Soa Tome and Principe 2008 People, Jim Kempner Fine Art, New York Scratches on the Face, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, travelling to: National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai Brave New Worlds, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN Between Us – Entre Nous – Phakathi Kwethu, Iart Gallery, Cape Town New Orleans Biennale World Receiver: 10 Years Galerie der Gegenwart, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany 2007 Existencias, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, MUSAC, León, Spain Apartheid: El Mirall Sud-Africà, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona South African Art: Modern Art and Cultural Development in a Changing Society, Danubiana, Meulensteen Art Museum, Bratislava, Slovakia So Close So Far Away, Crac Alsace, France Defining Moments in Photograph from the MCA Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Planet Afrika: Carte Blanche, curated by Thomas Mank, Kultursysteme, Berlin 2006 The Living is Easy, Flowers East, Hoxton, London Black Panther Rank and File, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco Black, Brown & White, Kunsthalle Vienna, Austria Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography, International Center of Photography, New York The Whole World is Rotten, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH Why Pictures Now, MUMOK Lounge, Museum Moderner Kunst, Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna Cross-Currents in Recent Video Installation: Water as a Metaphor for Identity, Tisch Gallery, Boston Adelaide Bank Festival of Arts, Artists’ Week 2006, curated by Julianne Pierce, Adelaide, Australia 2005 Emergencies, at the Museo de Arte Contemporeneo de Castilla y Leon, MUSAC, Spain Ticket to the Other Side, Hengevoss-Duerkop Gallery, Hamburg The Forest: Politics, Poetics, and Practice, The Nasher Museum at Duke University, NC The Venice Biennial, The Experience of Art, curated by Maria de Corral New Work/New Acquisitions, Museum of Modern Art, New York Green to Green and Beyond, Gallery W 52, New York A Passion for Pictures, North Carolina Museum of Art Imprints: Works on paper, Axis Gallery, New York The Whole World is Rotten: Free Radicals and the Gold Coast Slave Castles of Paa Joe, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York Earth and Memory: African and African-American Photograph, Elizabeth Stone Harper Gallery, Presbyterian College, Clinton, SC

2004–5 The Prague Biennale African Art, African Voices, Philadelphia Museum of Art Common Ground, Discovering Community in 150 Years of Art, Selections from the Collection of Julia J Norrell, Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington, DC Sao Paulo Biennial, curated by Simon Njami, Brazil Tama University Art Gallery, Tokyo Africa Remix, Zeitgenossische Kunst eines Kontinents, travelling to: Museum Kunst Palast, Dusseldorf Hayward Gallery, London Pompidou Centre, Paris Mori Art Museum, Tokyo Gwangju Biennale, South Korea Where?, Clifford Chance Projects, New York 2004 Passaporto, Le Meridien Lingotto Art & Tech, Torino, Italy Ipermercati dell’Arte, Palazzo delle Papesse, Sienna, Italy Made in Africa Fotografia, Musei di Porta Romana, Milan Festival della Fotografia, British Academy, Rome Festival Couleur Café, curated by Hernau Bertiau, Tour et Taxis, Brussels New Identities: Contemporary South Africa Art, Bochum Museum, Germany Postcards from Cuba, a selection from the 8th Havana Biennale, Henie Onstad Kunstenter, Oslo Vth Bamako Encounters, Afritudine, Musei di Porta Romama/Galleria Arteutopia, Italy Grenier a sel, in Honfleur, France Kornhausforum, Berne, Switzerland 2003–4 Body and the Archive, Artists’ Space, New York The Gift: Generous Offerings, Threatening Hospitality, organised by Independent Curators International and travelling to: Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, AZ Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, NZ Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario 2003 8th Havana Biennial, Cuba Istanbul Biennial, curated by Dan Cameron Strangers: The First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video, International Center of Photography, curated by Brian Wallis, New York Prague Biennial, Czech Republic Portraiture (Every Picture Tells A Story), Solomon Projects, Atlanta Sharjah International Biennale, curated by Hoor AlQasimi and Peter Lewis 2002 New Acquisitions/ New Works/ New Directions 3: Contemporary Selections, Los Angeles County Museum of Art Staging, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO Untitled, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York In Situ – Portraits of People at Home, Hand Workshop Art Center, Richmond, VA Cultural Crossing, Numark Gallery, Washington, DC Fuoriuso, curated by Teresa Macri, Ferrotel, Pescara, Italy Shopping: Art and Consumer Culture, travelling exhibition to: Schrin Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Germany Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, UK Tracing the Rainbow, travelling exhibition to: Kunst Raum Sylt-Quelle, Germany Kulturverein Zehntscheuer, Rottenburg/Nechtar, Germany Group Exhibition, Marco Noire Contemporary Art, San Sebastiano, Italy Overnight to Many Cities: Tourism and Travel at Home and Away, The Photographers’ Gallery, London Dis/location, Sala Rekalde, Bilbao, Spain Centro Cultural de Maia, O’Porto, Portugal Sudafrica: la pittura, la fotographia, il cinema, Centro Trevi, Bolzano, Italy Videoarte Africana, 25° Bienal de Sao Paulo, Brazil 2001 I Love NY, benefit exhibition, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945-1994, curated by Okwui Enwezor, travelling to: Museum Villa Stuck, Munich Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Martin-Gropius-Bau, Belgium Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago P.S. 1 Museum for Contemporary Art, New York A Passion for Art: The Disaronno Originale Photography Collection, travelling to: Miami Art Museum, FL New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

University of California, Berkeley, Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA Africa Today, curated by Pep Subiros, Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona, Spain Boomerang: Collector’s Choice, Exit Art, New York 2000 Africa 2000: The Artist and the City, Barcelona Center for Contemporary Culture, Spain Overnight to Many Cities: Travel and Tourism at Home and Away, 303 Gallery, New York Paris pour escale, Musee d’Art Moderna de la Ville de Paris The Gift, Generous Offerings, Threatening Hospitality, Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena travelling to: Palazzo Candiolo, Venice San Francisco, CA Scottsdale Museum of Art, AZ TRADE – Wares, ways and values in world trade today, Fotomuseum Wintherthur, Germany Nederlands Foto Institut, Rotterdam Centro de Belles Artes, Madrid Storie Contemporanee, curated by Paola Tognon, Museo Civico di Bergamo, Italy Frankfurtkunstverein, Frankfurt Simultaneous, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York A3HB, Hans Bogatske Collection of Contemporary African Art, Camouflage, Brussels Five Artists Having Fun, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney A.R.E.A. 2000, curated by Gavin Younge, Kjarvaisstadir, Reykjavik, Iceland South Meets West, Kunsthalle Bern, curated by Bernard Fibicher, Switzerland Mirades Impudiques, curated by Rosa Olivares and Marta Gili, Fundacio La Caixa Barcelona Dire Aids – Say Aids, Promotrice delle Belle Arti, Torino, Italy Biennale Dakar, curated by Hans Bogatzke, Senegal Arts and Human Rights, Kwangju International Biennale, curated by Ichiro Hariu, Seoul, Korea Home, Perth International Arts Festival, Art Gallery of Perth Cultural Centre, Australia Il Sentimento del 2000, Arte E Foto: 1960/2000, La Triennale de Milano Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth Mostra Africana de Arte Conemporanea, Video Brazil, Sao Paulo L’Afrique a jour, in collaboration with Biennale Dakar 2000, AFAA, Lille, France Pusan International Contemporary Art Festival, curated by Rosa Martinez, Pusan, Korea Foto Biennale Rotterdam, curated by Clive Kellner Public Collections San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Modern Art (NY), The Studio Museum in Harlem (NY), Guggenheim Museum (NY), The New Museum (NY),The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, National Museum of African Art (Washington DC), Pretoria Art Museum, Mary and Leigh Block Gallery (Northwestern University), University of South Africa, Durban Art Gallery, Tatham Art Gallery (RSA), University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa), South African Embassy (Washington DC), Sasol (Durban, Cape Town, New York), Cape Department of Education Trust (RSA), Arco Foundation (Madrid), Gilbey’s Ltd, Metropolitan Life (RSA), South African Breweries (RSA), Old Mutual (RSA), Gencor SA Ltd (RSA), Transnet Ltd (RSA), Sanlam (RSA), Johannesburg Art Gallery, South African Reserve Bank, Herdboys (RSA), Rand Merchant Bank (RSA), Wooltru (RSA), Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art (Northwestern University), Kunsthalle Hamburg (Germany), Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art – Cornell University (NY), South African National Gallery, LaSalle Bank (Chicago), Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leon (Spain), Progressive Corporate Art Collection (Ohio), North Carolina Museum of Art, Bouwfonds Art Collection (Netherlands), The Corcoran Museum Gallery of Art (Washington DC), Daimler Chrysler Collection (Germany), Smithsonian Museum (Washington DC), Boland Bank (RSA), PKS (RSA), Siemans Ltd (RSA), ABSA Bank (RSA), MTN Collection (RSA), Vodacom Collection (RSA), JSE – Stock Exchange (RSA), Stellenbosch University (RSA), Samuel Harn Museum, (USA), Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig (Austria), Absolut Collection (Sweden), Ministere Culture Communication (France), Pompidou Centre (France) Selected Recent Bibliography Sue Williamson,‘Zwelethu Mthethwa’. South African Art Now, HarperCollins: New York, 2010. Okwui Enwezor, Isolde Brielmaier, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Aperture Foundation: New York, 2010 Okwui Enwezor, Chika Okeke-Agula, Contemporary African Art Since 1980, Damiani: Bologna, 2009.

DIFFICULT DANCE ALEXANDRA DODD

‘The great thing about being human is our ability to face adversity down by refusing to be defined by it, refusing to be no more than its agent or its victim ... I could have dwelt on the harsh humiliations of colonial rule or the more dramatic protests against it. But I am also fascinated by that middle ground … where the human spirit resists an abridgment of its humanity.’ Chinua Achebe1

The Family’s prized possession (detail) 2009 pastel on cotton paper 107 x 210 cm

‘They sang very weird songs – traditional songs I wasn’t really familiar with. They danced differently, they spoke a different dialect …’ Zwelethu Mthethwa2

Dreams from another time ‘I’ve worked all my life with the cultures on the periphery of the city,’ says Zwelethu Mthethwa, taking a step back from two immense and dazzlingly vivid pastel drawings coming to life on the wall of his studio in the old heart of downtown Cape Town. ‘For me, culture at the periphery offers a lot. There’s a lot of stuff, lots of layers about how we live. And I remember what drew me there first …’ The recollection takes him back to another place, another time. For although Mthethwa has made Cape Town his adult home, inhabiting its very epicentre on a daily basis, he – like the characters he photographs and conjures in his drawings – was also once a disoriented stranger in this peninsular city. As a young boy growing up in Umlazi on the undulating hilly outskirts of Durban, he remembers ‘guys coming from the hostels into the township’. ‘They looked very different; more traditional and rural,’ he recalls. ‘And they sang songs which were weird to me; traditional songs I wasn’t really familiar with. They danced differently, they spoke a different dialect and they always travelled in a group, so the dogs would bark when they passed by, creating a spectacle. As kids we were drawn to that noise, so we’d go there and check them out. Even as a kid, I was attracted to that idea of “us and them”. ‘It’s the same thing with the culture at the outskirts of the city today,’ he says. ‘People come looking for jobs mainly, but city

The Family’s prized possession 2009 pastel on cotton paper 107 x 210 cm

people always look at them with suspicion and say they’re different to us.’ Mthethwa remains drawn to outsider communities, fascinated by the dissonance between people’s damning preconceptions and the realities of life within these communities. ‘The assumption about people who live in informal settlements is that they are dirty, that there’s a large criminal element there, but when you get there, you find that people don’t match up to your initial suspicions. Once you step inside, their houses look spectacular – they might be poor, but that doesn’t mean that they are not house-proud. I try to focus on the elements that are positive. It’s about looking at poverty very carefully and trying to avoid making sweeping statements.’ Both of the drawings on which he is currently working are fastened to a vast scrawled-on stretch of wooden crate covering the wall of his studio and bearing the markings of ten full years of work in this downtown space. Both images emerging from the flat, whiteness of paper illustrate shackland communities on the peri-urban fringes of Cape Town. A cluster of government-issue houses is growing up on a stretch of land in the near distance, goats run through the dusty alleys between makeshift houses or a pack of stray hounds sniffs around a vacant lot that is being used as a football pitch, discarded tyres hold down the corrugated iron roofs of makeshift homes … But the contingency of the circumstances does not rob these scenes of their beauty or buoyancy. For Mthethtwa, images are a medium through which to narrate the myriad ways in which people adapt to the challenges of their circumstances. In The New Community, butterflies dance around the head of a young girl wearing a mysterious blue mask. ‘These creatures start as little pupas and become butterflies, so they connote I Depend on You 2010 pastel on cotton paper 107 x 183 cm

growth and change,’ says Mthethwa, ‘but change that is beautiful, because if you look at the pupa and you look at the butterfly you’d think they are two things that are not remotely related. It’s about a beautiful change.’ ‘I have always been a visual person,’ he says. His passion for drawing kicked in early, at the age of six. When he was 12, he was given a camera by a lodger who was living with his family at the time. And his immersion in the language of the visual was sealed by an early love of movies. ‘When I grew up, we didn’t have real cinemas. We had a hall,’ he recalls. ‘Our neighbour had a projector and he was the projectionist at that hall. The hall had very high windows and my dad had a very high ladder, so the neighbour would borrow the ladder from my dad every Saturday to block the windows so that light didn’t pour into the room. Because of that I could go in and out for free, so that’s how it started.’

Begging for More 2010 pastel on cotton paper 107 x 156 cm

‘I am speaking about visual practices that recognize coevalness, that reach beyond the stock images that have endured until now as the iconography of the “abandoned” continent.’ Okwui Enwezor, Snap Judgments 3

Immediate histories Mthethwa was born in 1960 at the height of apartheid. This was the year of the Sharpeville Massacre when the South African police opened fire on a crowd of black protesters killing 69 people and fuelling an uproar of riots and demonstrations across the country, and the declaration of a state of emergency. It was also the year in which Cameroon, Somalia, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire and other African states gained their independence, and the year that kickstarted a heady decade of free love, space travel, counterculture and social revolution. Mthethwa’s arts education was initiated at the Open School in Durban, which was founded privately and was one of the few institutions in the country at the time that offered black students a chance to be educated in fine art. This enabled him to gain entry to Michaelis School of Fine Art at Cape Town University, and it was at this time that he began photographing the beginnings of informal squatter camps around Cape Town.

The Couple in the Next Room (detail) 2009 pastel on cotton paper 107 X 150 cm

After graduating, he received a Fulbright Scholarship that allowed him to study at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he received his Masters degree in Imaging Arts in 1989. It wasn’t long before he started to gain a reputation for his largerthan-life pastel drawings and large-format photographs of the inhabitants of the poor settlements on the outer fringes of the Mother City. Since the end of apartheid and the start of the democratic era in 1994, South African photography has exploded from a charged cell of semi-isolation onto the world stage. Having had over 35 solo exhibitions in the United States, France, Germany, Italy, South Africa and Switzerland, Mthethwa’s photographic portraits have been key to this global proliferation of South African images. ‘Photography has maintained a vital presence in African culture for over a century. But the recognition of African photo graphers and their unique visual language has come about only recently,’ writes curator and art historian Okwui Enwezor in the book that accompanied the watershed 2006 exhibition Snap Judgments at the International Centre of Photography, which included images by Mthethwa. ‘When Western photography engages Africa, it seems often to evoke pathological images of disease, corruption, and poverty. The global media almost never depict contemporary Africans in ordinary situations; images of crisis frequently eclipse other

Untitled (from the Coal Miner Series) 2008 chromogenic print 150 x 193 cm Unique

representations. In response to this partial view that overlooks the complexities of daily life across a vast continent of over fifty nations, [images like Mthethwa’s] force a recognition of the contradictory and varied forms of photographic practice that are now arising across Africa.’4 Mthethwa is motivated by a desire to create ‘a contemporary history’5 that portrays people in a humane light. In his photographs, people appear not as the desperate, hopeless inhabitants of yet another nameless shantytown, but as feisty survivors with few resources, but a persistent will to happiness despite the sometimes cramped and compromised nature of their circumstances. ‘From the earliest recorded history of the photographic encounter, Africa has made for a fascinating and elusive subject, at once strange, intoxicating, carnal, primitive, wild, luminous,’ writes Enwezor. ‘Wherever and whenever photography engages Africa, it invents a pathology of spectrality and transience. Each pathology in turn invents its own panacea: pity, infantilisation, paternalism, or the re-animation of the grotesque … The act of photographing Africa has often been bound up with a certain conflict of vision: between how Africans see their world and how others see that world. In a way, this is a clash of lenses, a struggle to locate and represent Africa by two committed but disparate sensibilities – one intensely absorbed in its social and

Untitled (from Coal Miner series) 2008 chromogenic print 81 x 104 cm Edition 1/3

cultural world, the other passing through it, fleetingly, on one assignment or another.’ As an African documenting the world in which he is ‘ intensely absorbed’, Mthethwa’s images are not are not about disorder, plague, collapse, war or desperation. Never ignoring the landscape and environment, he documents domestic life and the harsh realities of labour, keying into the rhythms of modern South African life and the lives of those in our neighbouring states connected to this country via the currents of labour and migrancy that flow across our increasingly fluid borders. His images of families, relationships and people interacting with their environments document both urban and rural realities, capturing a range of different aspects of life in South Africa. His studio is testament to his passion for people and pop culture. The sound of a pennywhistler on the street below wafts in through the open sash windows and mingles with Sly & The Family Stone’s Everyday People blasting out from a portable radio hidden behind three easels: ‘I am no better and neither are you We’re all the same, whatever we do You love me, you hate me You know me, and then You can’t figure out the bag I’m in I am everyday people’

Untitled (from Quartz Miner series) 2008 chromogenic print 81 x 104 cm Edition 1/3

In addition to the innumerable sticks of pastel in every imaginable colour that cover an entire trestle table in the centre of his studio, spilling over onto the window ledges, the walls are covered in images of football heroes, sangomas, soul divas and newspaper headlines retrieved from publications like the Daily Voice and City Press. ‘When I am in my studio I am in an enclosed space and I am alone. I don’t allow a lot of people in – only my very close friends. It’s my own private world. And when that world gets too intense for me, I go out into the landscape and take photos,’ says Mthethwa. ‘I interact with other people and see more things than when I am in my own private space. I like moving between these two different worlds.’ The line between photography and drawing is a fairly fluid one for Mthethwa, who deems both media to be of equal importance, allowing a free flow of conceptual traffic between his two fields of practice. Many of the elements in his vital pastel drawings are based on photographs, while his photographs are consciously constructed, with forms and colours operating in similar ways to the planes and patterns of an abstract painting. ‘Unlike David Goldblatt’s superlative images that are indelibly rooted in the nuanced history of the land, Mthethwa’s pictures contemplate the realities of the immediate present, in a manner that forgoes a heavy-handed anthropological or documentary dissection, and instead employs a more intimate and humanist

Untitled (from Mozambique series) 2006 chromogenic print 84 x 106 cm Edition 2/3

touch,’ write the young collectors behind the cult American photography blog, DLK Collection6. His work addresses the economic and political realities of present-day South Africa in a manner that does not conceal the hardships of working-class life, but also infuses one with a sense of the almost zany hopefulness of a new nation in a phase of rapid growth and metamorphosis. In this sense, his works militate against what curator Okwui Enwezor refers to as ‘Afropessimism’7, grappling instead with the compelling immediacies of post-apartheid life in South Africa.

Untitled (Gladiator 23) 2008 chromogenic print 81 x 104 cm Edition 2/3

‘My aim is to show the pride of the people I photograph.’ Zwelethu Mthethwa8

Getting to know you People are at the centre of Mthethwa’s oeuvre. Whether we encounter them as some kind of contemporary Samurai warrior wielding a sharpened machete at the crest of a vast field of sugar cane, leaning against a mountain of coal sacks, scavenging for recyclables in an immense pile of rubbish, or digging their way through a torrent of red quartz dust, in their gaze one detects an irrepressible note of stoic perseverance, and in their pose sometimes even a flash of pride or defiance. The large scale of his photographs, coupled with a directness of gaze, establishes a confrontation between the spectator and the subject, whose exhaustion, weariness or blank indifference is never masked. Somehow, though, there is always some redeeming detail to rescue his subjects’ individuality from the relentless morass of hard labour or rugged survival against which they are pitted. It is this tension that imparts to his images such a strong psychological impact. Mthethwa is intent on revealing people’s dignified efforts to maintain a sense of quirky personal identity in the ways they choose to decorate their homes or the styles in which they choose to dress. Even if the people in his images are shouldering up against social forces beyond their control, there are some areas of life over which they do exercise a degree of choice. Despite overcrowded living conditions, rough cardboard walls

Untitled (from Sugar Cane series) 2003 chromogenic print 150 x 187 cm Unique

and corrugated iron roofs, peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cramped personal spaces have been made to somehow take on their unique personalities. Colourful pop-cultural clippings from newspapers and magazines cover the walls like wallpaper, revealing peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s desire for beauty, glamour, sexiness or even just a bit of upbeat decoration. When one looks closely at the images that make up Mthethwaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Interiors series, one is overtaken by an air of disarming tenderness in observing, for example, that a man who does not possess a wardrobe has hung his only pair of pants on a hanger to keep them neat and straight, as if they had been ironed, or that a woman has gone to the trouble of cutting newspaper into pretty patterns to adorn her very basic kitchen cabinet. One is struck by the sensitivity with which people have laid out their limited belongings to lend a dash of definitiveness to the small spaces they call home.

Untitled (from Interior series) 2000 chromogenic print 96,5 x 129,5 cm Edition 2/3

I am trying to portray people in a different light. They may well be poor, but I want to portray them as decent human beings, people like any other people.’ Zwelethu Mthethwa

Photographer/Photographed Legendary 20th-century photographer and Magnum Photos co-founder Robert Capa famously declared that if your photographs were no good it was because you were not close enough to your subject. It’s an assertion that bears particular relevance to Mthethwa’s photographs, which evidence a great sense of ease and openness between author and subject. Unlike news photographers, who tend to swoop in and out of social contexts driven by the urgency of deadlines and news cycles, Mthethwa returns again and again to the communities he photographs, establishing relationships with people over time. ‘Some projects take years to be finalised,’ he says. ‘Sometimes I don’t get the image I’m looking for, so I’ll return a year later and try again.’ He tries to establish a connection and a free-flowing exchange with his subjects to ensure that they play a role in how they are depicted. Acutely aware of the ethical concerns and power dynamics at play in the photographic contract, he has described the relationship he develops with his subjects as ‘a difficult dance’9. ‘When I use my camera, my subjects are very much aware that I am taking photographs because I always ask them, and people either grant me a yes or a no. They are very much aware of my intentions,’ he says. ‘In this regard, I am not the only

Untitled (from Sugar Cane series) 2003 chromogenic print 81 x 104 cm Edition 1/3

director. I am the principal author because I edit, but it is some kind of collaboration.’ In a recent discussion with Mthethwa, Enwezor asked him if it had ever occurred to him that his images might be guilty of glamorising poverty. ‘Is there an ethical commitment on your part in terms of how your photographs operate in the world in relation to the subjects themselves, but also their situation?’ asked Enwezor. ‘I try to be as honest as I can with people,’ Mthethwa replied. ‘The photographs are not rushed. I go back and forth until I think that I’ve got the right one … When I move into people’s spaces, with which they are very familiar, it gives them a certain kind of power to be very assertive, to be very sure of themselves,’ he said. ‘I don’t use flash because flash somehow glamorises things … I am trying to portray people in a different light. They may well be poor, but I want to portray them as decent human beings, people like any other people.’

Untitled (Gladiator 11 from Contemporary Gladiator series) 2008 chromogenic print 81 x 104 cm Edition 2/3

‘I chose colour because it provides a

For me, black is a phenomenal colour

greater emotional range.’

because it is a composite of all other

Zwelethu Mthethwa10

colours. When the sun is very bright and shines on black skin, it becomes very poetic. Zwelethu Mthethwa

Hymns of Colour Imagine if Mthethwa’s images were in black and white. Somehow the soul would be drained from them and they would come across as a lot more grim or depressing. The proliferation of background detail in his photographs – the bright lettering or the repetitive patterning of brands or logos – would be lost to us. The emerald green of a floral wallpaper, the pale cerulean blue of a cloudless sky above a sugarcane field in Umzinto or the ubiquity of the earthy red sand of the Mozambican quartz mines inject a note of the hyper-real into the real. Part of the emotional wallop delivered by both his drawings and his photographs, is drawn from the almost magical lushness of their colour. ‘Colour plays a major role in my work because it has this spirituality of lifting things, and infusing complex and spiritual understandings into the everyday,’ he says. His abundant palette, applied in an exuberant manner that is more poetic than strictly representational, recalls Henri Matisse’s mastery of the expressive language of colour. ‘Maybe ten years ago my faces were purple and then I’d have some red faces, some green faces …’ he says. ‘But of late I’ve been using very dark, grey-black faces, which are a new element in my work. For me, black is a phenomenal colour because it is a composite of all other colours. When the sun is very bright and Born Free 2010 pastel on cotton paper 107 x 155 cm

shines on black skin, it becomes very poetic. There are people who are called black, but they’re not black at all, so I wanted to start exploring the multiple nuances and shades of black.’ On first glance at one of his drawings, you might perceive the sky as being quite simply blue, but on closer examination you’ll notice it is not monochromatic at all, but an assembly of graded hues that make up the blue you see. ‘There are a lot of colours overlaid on top of each other, so when you look at it closely, you see different kinds of blues and greens in the sky,’ says Mthethwa. Similarly, you might on first glance imagine that that the crisp linen tablecloth you see in The Couple in the Next Room is pure white, when it is, in fact, a whole mixture colours that make up the texture of the cloth and the shadows cast by the hats and cups on this plain of apparent whiteness.

The Couple in the Next Room 2009 pastel on cotton paper 107 x 150 cm

My work is about people’s culture and football is a core element of township life. Zwelethu Mthethwa

Honest fictions Mthethwa composes his drawings in much the same way that a novelist strings together a narrative, drawing on exact documentary details from his lived and experienced world, and fusing them together with the glue of his imagination. His drawings are a rich amalgam of real and imagined worlds, based partly on photographic fragments, partly on memory and partly on direct representations of the real. The woman carrying a bucket on her head in MaDlamini out bound to the Meat Market is based on a photograph of a stranger, whereas the male character wearing the bright yellow makarapa hat in the same drawing is the artist’s friend, Harry Sithole, who owns the shop, African Image, on the corner of Church Street, just below Mthethwa’s studio. Sithole came into the studio to model for Mthethwa, as car guards in the area sometimes do. But his image has been stitched into a peri-urban scene based on other visual fragments from life and photographs. In this way current documentary realities come to play a role in imagined scenes. You’ll notice, for example, the presence of aeroplane vapour trailing in the sky in several images, referencing carbon emissions and the current fragility of the environment. So what appears to be a beautiful blue sky on a harmless MaDlamini out bound to the Meat Market 2010 pastel on cotton paper 107 x 150 cm

sunny day is also a subtle reference to the contemporary politics of environmental abuse. A burning brazier in an enclosed room is a warm and glowing point of focus in another image, but also references the health hazards of township living. The bucket is another recurring motif, pointing to limited natural resources and people’s lack of access to fundamental amenities like running water. At the same time, the bucket evidences people’s desire to stay clean and healthy. As an artist of the immediate, contemporary world, Mthethwa’s images are also scattered with references to the workingclass legacy of the game of football, which has always been the people’s sport of choice. ‘We can’t ignore the World Cup,’ he exclaims. ‘It’s a really big event in the world ... My work is about people’s culture and football is a core element of township life.’ A single drawing may combine elements from both urban and rural landscapes, fusing them together like novelistic geographies to create seamless visions of the world as it exists in Mthethwa’s mind and the minds of the people who populate his images. Double geographies and dual fidelities are common in South Africa where most people are torn between the place of their origin [and often their eventual return, in death] and the city that has shaped their adult working lives. Patterns of forced migrancy were entrenched by the homeland system under apartheid, which ensured a steady flow of cheap labour to the mines. And the constant upheavals, transitions and spatial transformations of migrancy persist in the post-apartheid era against a broader global backdrop of wanderers and wandering. ‘When I started working in the informal settlements, I wanted to find out where people actually come from, so I went out into the country to try to trace their roots and get a visual sense of how people live in those settings. Migrancy is not just a thing that The Only Child 2010 pastel on cotton paper 107 x 180 cm

happens within South Africa’s borders, but regionally too,’ says Mthethwa. ‘So I was always curious to see where in our neighbouring countries people had come from,’ says M thethwa. ‘Sometimes the scene I’m depicting is in an informal settlement, but the view out of the window is a contrasting view of a rural area. But that could just be a mind game.’ He calls it a ‘mind game’, but perhaps this stitching together of disparate places – this fusing of double geographies – is also a kind of attunement or healing. In the plane of the image, as in the spiritual plane, two places exist not as a fractious duality, but as a continuum – a whole. The world has been reconstituted on a single flat plane, and in that fertile dreamspace it hums with lush colour and it is abundantly beautiful.

Notes 1 Achebe, C, 2010. The Education of a British Protected Child. London and New York: Penguin Classics: An imprint of Penguin Books, pp 22–23 2 Zwelethu Mthethwa interviewed by Alexandra Dodd, 23 February 2010, Cape Town, South Africa 3 Enwezor, O, 2006. Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography. New York: Steidl ICP 4 Enwezor, O, 2006. Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography. New York: Steidl ICP 5 Zwelethu Mthethwa and Curator and Dean of Academic Affairs of San Francisco Art Institute, Okwui Enwezor, in conversation, Aperture Gallery and Bookstore, March 2010 6 http://dlkcollection.blogspot.com/2010/02/book-zwelethu-mthethwa.html 7 Enwezor, O, 2006. Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography. New York: Steidl ICP 8 Zwelethu Mthethwa interviewed by Alexandra Dodd, 23 February 2010, Cape Town, South Africa 9 Zwelethu Mthethwa and Curator and Dean of Academic Affairs of San Francisco Art Institute, Okwui Enwezor, in conversation, Aperture Gallery and Bookstore, March 2010 10 Zwelethu Mthethwa interviewed by Alexandra Dodd, 23 February 2010, Cape Town, South Africa Red Wall 2009 pastel on cotton paper 108 x 180 cm

Zwelethu Mthethwa would like to thank: Alexandra Dodd Everard Read Framed Master Gilders and Framers iArt Jack Shainman Gallery Jurie Senekal Orms

Cover image

MaDlamini out bound to the Meat Market (detail) 2010 pastel on cotton paper 107 x 150 cm

This exhibition catalogue is published in conjunction with the exhibition Is it our goal …? and other related issues – Photographs and pastel works by Zwelethu Mthethwa at CIRCA on Jellicoe, Johannesburg 3 June – 30 June 2010 Published in 2010 by CIRCA on Jellicoe, 2 Jellicoe Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg Copyright © CIRCA on Jellicoe Copyright text © Alex Dodd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission from the publishers.

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ISBN 978-0-620-47119-0

The New Community (detail) 2010 pastel on cotton paper 107 x 210 cm