Continental Drift

The African American Museum offers a selection of contemporary South African Art with a gorgeous installation and inherent resonance.

BY EVE HILL-AGNUS PHOTOGRAPHS BY KEVIN TODORA

The poised, photographic self-portrait by Zanele Muholi that opens the portraiture section of If You Look Hard Enough, You Can See Our Future at the African American Museum could be enough. Muholi’s black-and-white technique picks up the light and velvety shadows of skin lying under diaper-pin regalia in a three-quarter profile in which the nonbinary, queer artist fixes their gaze in the distance with quiet power. It could be enough to convince you of the urgent and self-questioning, multivalent and eloquent vibrancy of South African art. The exhibition titled after Stephen Hobbs’ aquatint, and subtitled Selections of Contemporary South African Art from the Nando’s Art Collection, includes 55 artists and five dozen works, including those by a handful of artists from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe who have settled in the artistic communities of Cape Town or Johannesburg.

What they elucidate is the contemporary South African artistic landscape 30 years after the end of apartheid, but also 30 years after a cultural embargo that starved South Africa of international shows and deprived the rest of the world of glimpses of what was simmering in real time, what those within the art community knew was happening.

The late Dick Enthoven (who passed away last year), a South African businessman who decided to display original artwork in his successful Nando’s restaurants, was a connoisseur who collected throughout the mid-20th century and into the 21st century. He was as invested in South African artists as in the anti-apartheid movement.

The show, perfectly paced and hung, is quite extraordinary and rare, a yoking of established artists and newer talent, such that the viewing yields rich discoveries. Those who admire William Kentridge will see Kentridge, but two unusual works—a linoleum cut and a deftly conceived three-dimensional piece. Those who viewed the dreamlike work of Portia Zvavahera (Zimbabweanborn but practicing in South Africa) at the Venice Biennale last year will find her, but in small format. Now globally renowned, such artists are shown in their context.

Curator Laurie Ann Farrell has devised a stunning installation— gorgeous under the museum galleries’ 56-foot-long barrel vaults. The visual effect of a salon hanging, specifically, creates a dense weave, establishing a textural lushness and aesthetic unity among the disparate oeuvres. Farrell has neatly divided the show into the categories of portraiture, landscape, and abstraction. Thematically, “the exhibition raises many issues, ranging from dispossession to the foregrounding of self and a claiming of identity,” says Sue Williamson, whose 12-photograph work lays bare the seismic fractures and social and economic violences of displacement and race-based land dispossession. (In this case by following a family in the residential District Six of Cape Town.)

Discordant echoes arise for the American viewer, a sense of shared preoccupations clustered around the painful nodes of systemic racism and identity denial. The ubiquitous brutality of the apartheid-era’s white supremacist government is as present an undercurrent as the burning orange sun.

It is impossible, for example, to witness Vivien Kohler’s enveloping Pietà, in which two Black figures take on the familiar, canonical posture of intolerable, ineffable grief, and not find oneself mourning. But by the same token, Tamlin Blake’s Tied by Time is a newspaper tapestry so large, nuanced, and ephemeral it seems to defy imagination. Materiality beckons the viewer closer, whether Mbongeni Buthelezi’s melted-plastic painting, Anastasia Pather’s fingerpainted abstraction, or Willie Bester’s canvas that incorporates reclaimed and found materials—a guitar, bullet casings—into its thick surface. Moments of ethereal beauty, like Penny Siopis’s veil-like painting, are held in harmony with moments when tactility becomes an eruptive presence. It is, ultimately, a show with beautiful pacing, rhythm, and resonance.

Part of the show’s strength is this effect of taut and sustained pulling in. Neither its beaches nor its cityscapes—nor, pointedly, its struggles—feel far away. The viewer is implicated. As the “our” in the title suggests, “We’re in this together,” Farrell says.

Pather suggests in a Zoom conversation spanning continents that such a show, with such a curator, can be seen as the “start [of] a new conversation about what the South African aesthetic could be if it was looked at from afar.” Such a conversation must unite, as the show deliberately does, the resistance artists of apartheid and the post-apartheid generation, whose concerns are different but equally engaged. And even without knowing that these works were drawn from 25,000—which they were—one senses that this is the piercing reflections off sea spray, and underneath, the ocean is vast.

“My hope is that people will see new things that inspire them; that when people leave the show, they’ve seen things they’ll think about,” Farrell says. P