Nicholas Hlobo
Nicholas Hlobo
MICHAEL STEVENSON
Standard Bank Young Artist Award 2009
Nicholas Hlobo Essays by Mark Gevisser, Kopano Ratele and Jen Mergel
Standard Bank Young Artist Awards 2008 Nontsikelelo Veleko / 2007 Pieter Hugo / 2006 Churchill Madikida / 2005 Wim Botha / 2004 Kathryn Smith / 2003 Berni Searle / 2002 Brett Murray / 2001 Walter Oltmann / 2000 Alan Alborough / 1998 Nhlanhla Xaba / 1997 Lien Botha / 1996 Trevor Makhoba / 1995 Jane Alexander / 1994 Sam Nhlengethwa / 1993 Pippa Skotnes / 1992 Tommy Motswai / 1991 Andries Botha / 1990 Bonnie Ntshalintshali and Fee Halsted-Berning / 1989 Helen Sebidi / 1988 Margaret Vorster / 1987 William Kentridge / 1986 Gavin Younge / 1985 Marion Arnold / 1984 Peter SchĂźtz / 1983 Malcolm Payne / 1982 Neil Rodger / 1981 Jules van der Vijver
Schedule of the touring exhibition National Arts Festival, Grahamstown 2-11 July 2009 Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum, Port Elizabeth 29 July - 20 September 2009 Durban Art Gallery, Durban 2 December 2009 - 18 January 2010 Oliewenhuis Art Museum, Bloemfontein 11 February - 14 March 2010 Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg 30 March - 8 May 2010 Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town 30 May - 15 August 2010
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Essays
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Under Covers, Out in the Open: Nicholas Hlobo and Umtshotsho
Mark Gevisser 19
Pride and Playfulness: Hlobo’s Subversive Love of Xhosa Traditions
Kopano Ratele 27
Nicholas Hlobo: In Medias Res
Jen Mergel 33
Selected Works 2005 – 2009
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Biography
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Acknowledgments
Contents
Essays
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Under Covers, Out in the Open: Nicholas Hlobo and Umtshotsho Mark Gevisser Studio photographs by Sabelo Mlangeni
When I went to visit Nicholas Hlobo in his downtown Johannesburg studio in April 2009, I was struck by a quick but elegant sketch in a corner of the vast “visual diary” tacked onto the walls of the loft-like space. In contrast to Hlobo’s associative, metaphorical and often elusive style, the sketch was startlingly direct: it represented one figure mounting another from behind. The artist had written two words above the drawing: “the soma”. Ukusoma is the traditional Xhosa practice whereby adolescents are permitted – in fact, encouraged – to have non-penetrative thigh-sex as part of the umtshotsho rituals which channel their libidos in the years before the boys go off to be initiated and circumcised. An umtshotsho is actually a peer-regulated youth organisation of adolescents, which holds parties 1 In their benchmark anthropological study of traditional Xhosa youth organisations, Philip and Iona Mayer wrote in
where mock-fighting, dancing and dating take place; a dry run, as it were, for lives of war and procreation.1
1970 that “sexual gratification” is “valued positively at all ages” in the culture, and that “adolescence is seen as a time
One obvious feature of ukusoma is that it is a crash course in traditional Xhosa gender
when both sex and fighting should be practised vigorously.
relations: the active party gets all the gratification, while the passive party learns to
As in any society, however, practising by adolescents carries
serve. Another more radical feature, however, is that the passive party is not necessarily
new risks in that this age is newly potent in both respects
female: “In Xhosa culture,” Hlobo tells me, “it’s well understood that when boys are in
– is fertile and also able to inflict death.” In this context,
the fields, that’s what they would do – because one was not allowed to have penetrative
the umtshotsho rituals both “encourage sexual and fighting
sex with girls.” But so long as you practise ukusoma, “what you can do with girls, you can
behaviour and channel them into desired directions”.
do with boys”.
Philip and Iona Mayer, ‘Socialization by Peers: The Youth
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Organization of the Red Xhosa’, in Philip Mayer (ed),
And so the figures in Hlobo’s sketch are in fact more elusive than they might
Socialization: The Approach from Social Anthropology, London:
originally seem: are they a boy and a girl, or are they two boys? And the artist intends
Tavistock, 1970: 159, 163.
his work to be allusive too: “This sketch is just for me to understand the bodies
Mark Gevisser
underneath,” he told me. “When the work is finished, all you’ll see is the blanket covering them, and just the suggestion of bodies. In my head, the bodies are there, but to the viewer, they are not …” Hlobo did not, in the end, make this particular piece for his Umtshotsho exhibition. But the dynamic he describes above offers a key to understanding his work, and in particular Izithunzi, the eight figures which form the largest part of the exhibition and his most complex and developed single installation yet. In Umtshotsho, as in so much of his work, Hlobo explores his identity and his sexuality, and the way these connect to his inner world and his biography. Here, more than ever, he expresses the paradox of being both out in the open and under the covers – an insider and outsider – in all the worlds he inhabits: Xhosa son, Eastern Cape homeboy, gay cosmopolitan, artworld rising star. Certainly, as is evidenced in his past shows, Hlobo can be sexually provocative. But he cannot be literal; has become increasingly unwilling to lay things bare. His genius, in Umtshotsho, lies in the way he has stitched together “blankets” from rubber and ribbon, leaving it to us to imagine what desires and dramas – what flesh and blood – might lurk beneath (and among) the multivalent, amoebic, hermaphroditic figures populating his Umtshotsho dance. The work is bold (what materials! what singular vision!) and convivial (welcome to the party!); humorous and playful. Yet the features on his characters’ often-ghoulish mask-like faces derive from traditional practices of scarification: they bring blood to the surface in an expression of pain and vulnerability. You might, like any kid at a party, sometimes feel lost or panicky rather than welcomed and affirmed at this
umtshotsho. “There’s a lot of covering, as opposed to revealing,” Hlobo said to me, as we examined the two completed figures in early May 2009. “The heads are closed.” The artist’s obsession with what is concealed and what is revealed extends to language. He loves the way that in both isiXhosa and the gay vernacular there is a tendency to signify rather than to say outright; to use codes which will be heard in one way by the members of your clan, and entirely differently by outsiders. This means, of course, that others are speaking, too, in ways you might not fully comprehend. Such multivalence opens up paradoxes, arising from his own biography, which he
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Under Covers, Out in the Open
embraces, and which give his work its unique energy. On the one hand, he wishes to celebrate and reclaim the openness of traditional Xhosa culture – particularly its freedom about the body and desire: “It is thanks to Christianity that nakedness is an offence and that one has to cover up; even as a man you can’t show off your arms. And I think to myself this is not part of us: if you look at photos from the early 1900s, the flesh is there.” And yet on the other hand, he is the son of an upright gqoboka (or “School”) family – Christians who have forsaken the old ways – and thus the selfconscious beneficiary of all that accrues from that. His family, of course, covered themselves in western clothing and learning, and disparaged everything to do with the “Red” people, the illiterate amaqaba, who smeared themselves with clay and went about naked. What this means is that Hlobo never, in fact, went anywhere near an umtshotsho party, although as a boy he often heard the singing taking place and fantasised about joining them: “These kids go there to experience life,” he told me, “they get to learn something. Unfortunately, I never did. I know very little about umtshotsho, because I never went to one.” The umtshotsho he has created here, then, is in part a fantasy, a willed reconstruction of a world Hlobo was denied; one in which he imagines he might have had the opportunity to channel his own illicit desires. All Hlobo’s work, to date, has been threaded thematically along the procreative cycle. His first exhibition was titled Izele, which means giving birth. His second was
Kwatsityw’iziko, or “crossing the hearth”, a metaphor for sex: “If Izele spoke of birth,” Hlobo wrote in the catalogue, “this show speaks of what happens before the birth, what causes the birth.”2 Now, in Umtshotsho, the artist spools backwards even further to that moment of socialisation that initiates the whole process. It is as if he is driven by trying to insert himself, as a gay man and a gqoboka son, into the cycle; to imagine his own umtshotsho to compensate for the one he was denied as a teenager. When I suggested this to him, he responded animatedly that he felt “very lucky” to have come of age – unlike gay men of earlier generations – in an era of liberation, one which validated that “the choice lies within you, not what other people tell you, 2 Nicholas Hlobo: Kwatsityw’iziko. Cape Town: Michael Stevenson. Catalogue 34 (April 2008).
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not even your parents”. His own parents were accepting and welcoming when he told them he was gay; “perhaps if I was born in the Fifties or Sixties I’d have kids and one
Mark Gevisser
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or two wives to fit in, and carry on doing my private stuff on the side. But the times are different; I have got this liberty which I am taking advantage of. I feel it would be very stupid of me to not to take advantage of the sort of liberties we are given.” Nonetheless, he grew up in the village of Newtown outside Idutywa – a stone’s throw from the home of Thabo Mbeki’s mother, Epainette, who ran the local store – feeling that there was no one in the world like him. His maternal grandmother, who raised him, was a stern disciplinarian, a traditional butcher and a taverner. While she would not let him stray anywhere near the umtshotsho parties of the amaqaba, she permitted him to hang around the tavern, listening to the elders gossip. Here he heard much talk about lesbians, but nothing ever about men who slept with men; lesbianism, he thinks, was tolerated because being a healer – or being bewitched – gave some women the licence to live independently of men, while the very thought of men not procreating was simply too challenging to the patriarchy even to be contemplated. Although he had a lover while at school in Mthatha, it was only when he came to Johannesburg in 1994 to work that he found his own umtshotsho. He had actually lived in Johannesburg before, with his parents in Tokoza, but they had been forced to return to the Eastern Cape because they found themselves in the middle of the sectarian violence that ripped the township apart in 1990. Now he was back in the city, alone, lodging with an aunt in Tembisa and coming into town to work every day. Thoroughly bored with his job – he had graduated from being a door-to-door popup-book salesman to measuring cement bags at PPC – he had taken to wandering the city; creating his own coordinates by discovering and mapping the urban environment around him. He was, as the historian George Chauncey has written about gay men in New York during the early 20th century, discovering his “personal autonomy” within the titillating anonymity of the city.3 It was this way that he stumbled into the Artist Proof Studio in Newtown and eventually found his way to the fine arts programme at the Technikon Witwatersrand (now University of Johannesburg); it was this way, too, that he found himself at the magazine rack in CNA on Commissioner Street, looking surreptitiously at an edition 3 George Chauncey, Gay New York, London: Flamingo, 1995
of Exit, the gay magazine, and – too nervous to actually buy the magazine – scribbling
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Mark Gevisser
down the address for the Skyline, Jo’burg’s iconic gay bar at the Harrison Reef Hotel on the corner of Pretoria and Twist Streets in Hillbrow. “It was very difficult to find, no signs, it was like you needed a password,” Hlobo remembered. “It was inside, next to the bakery, a little confectionary, and a shoe repair place. There are these steps but you do not know where they lead to, so I walked up and down.” He asked, but no one seemed to know of the place; “then I came across these drag queens and I thought, ‘Aha! These are the people I should ask!’ ‘Oh come with us darling, we going there,’ they said, and I followed them. I was so nervous I tripped on the stairs.” Thus did the Skyline Bar – around since the Sixties and now, like the neighbourhood around it, almost exclusively black – become Nicholas Hlobo’s umtshotsho. He would be there every day, rushing to get the train back to Tembisa in time for dinner. It clarified his thinking about concealment, and the underground: “I think gay life in the old days, everyone was underground. You had to be a real freak to be overground. And most establishments were unmarked, literally underground. People just go past. This makes me think about what is hidden and what is open; with revealing some things and hiding others; holding back. You’re never clear about what’s happening. You get to understand little by little.” Hlobo has an ambivalence – reflected in his work – about the contemporary
umtshotsho of the kind he experienced as opposed to the qaba one of his imagination: the traditional ritual was “good for your growth and your maturity, even if it was disparaged by the amagqoboka. Now the tradition has fallen away, you are allowed to do as you please, you take drugs, you indulge with sex, you really put yourself at risk. At times it really helps you, you learn to be careful and it helps you grow as well, you get to learn many things and become careful. Sometimes you get beaten but you say, ‘next time I am not going there, I am not doing that’.” His experience of the Skyline-umtshotsho was not altogether easy. Certainly, there was a wonder and a thrill in being “part of a community, one of hundreds of people rather than an odd person who thinks he’s cuckoo”. But from the moment a man offered him a drink on that first day, he was on guard, and aware of how he was both similar
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Under Covers, Out in the Open
and different to the men he met there: “Getting to see your peers, your community, meeting other gay people, it’s scary. You see all sorts of subcultures, like crossdressers. If you are a country boy, you’ve never seen anyone dress like that. Some people are really confusing. Some people are just different!” Hlobo does think of gay people as “tribal” not unlike Xhosas; he came to see how he defined himself individually, uniquely, even if he was part of both these tribes: “Going to my umtshotsho as a gay man, I got to realise that while there were certain things we had in common – the love and desire for other men – I was having some different views on life as a gay person to the others, and there were things I did not agree with.” When I pushed him to elaborate, he said: “For example, I was feeling that it was not necessary for a man to be like a woman. You could be a gay man and be a man. And I attribute that to my being a Xhosa man. I think I have great joy of manhood; I enjoy manhood.” His umtshotsho was “self-guided”, rather than under the watchful eye of the elders. “Yes, I am inserting myself,” he responded to my question about whether he was trying to find a place within a culture (or cultures) in which he did not quite belong. “But I am also developing my own ‘door policy’ – just like they had rules at the Skyline or at an
umtshotsho in the Eastern Cape. At the Skyline, I finally got to rub shoulders with many people who are similar to me. But at the same time I needed to stand out, be different, be myself; make my own rules.” Thus is his umtshotsho, ultimately, something internal: an ongoing act of self-regulation that he applies as his world expands vertiginously due to his increasing celebrity. I told Hlobo that I thought my own umtshotsho parties were those painful Saturday nights in the Johannesburg northern suburbs I endured throughout my teenage years, where you’d look for a dark space – an interstice – amongst all that rampant heterosexual activity from which you might ogle the male object of your desire, or even pull him in for a quick and surreptitious encounter. Did he imagine that such a space existed in the traditional umtshotsho, and does it exist in the world of his exhibition? He laughed, and told me that “perhaps the darkened corners are within the robes of the characters themselves. There is very little sense of a body, no limbs, but the body
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Mark Gevisser
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Under Covers, Out in the Open
is there. The idea of going to a dark space where you can hide exists, but it is within each character …” “So the body itself is mysterious?” “It’s more of a curiosity of what happens in the head.” As he often does in conversation, the artist began to roam, freely: “You know, the Skyline never had a dark corner. There was another place down the road, Fifty-Eight, that did. I went there twice and I got scared. I preferred the light-hearted people at the Skyline. It’s the fear of what happens in the dark. I’m quite naïve, you know. A while back I was on a mission to find rubber tubes, down in Doornfontein, and I bumped into the Factory [Johannesburg’s famous gay sex club]. I didn’t even know it existed. I told Jim, and he said, ‘You’re such a fool!’” Jim is Hlobo’s partner. They share a home in Berea: “family; where my heart is”. He has a bed in his studio, too, though: “Sometimes Jim complains he’s losing me to my art!” As we wandered around the huge room, he heaved his favourite character off the floor to show me what it would look like suspended, swaying in the wind as if dancing at an umtshotsho – or to the Skyline’s tacky Eighties disco: “The dance really helps you understand your culture. It is how we get to exhibit or celebrate who we are. It is very animated; a performance, a competition. I am sure if you go to umtshotsho for the first time it is as if you are going to a club for the first time. The chaperone, he greets you and offers you a glass of drink. Then you see people dancing. You get to learn new movements. And I think those movements are really important for one’s growth.” Still, there is a reason why this installation includes a red light in a leather lampshade, a work titled Kubomvu (“Beware”); a reason too why Hlobo has called his figures
Izithunzi: “Shadows” …
Mark Gevisser is the author, most recently, of Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred. He is working on a new book on photography, memory and identity.
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Pride and Playfulness: Hlobo’s Subversive Love of Xhosa Traditions Kopano Ratele
Nicholas Hlobo loves being Xhosa as much as he loves being a queer man. Each bleeds into the other. The compound is delicately poured into his work. He celebrates them, rubs each against the other, and in this manner revitalises his ethnic and sexual/ gender identity. As things stand emaXhoseni (amongst amaXhosa), as in most cultures in Africa, the two identities at the centre of the artist’s work sit in a tense relation. This outwardly riven love, it isn’t hard to see, is key to understanding the inner dynamics of Hlobo’s work; indeed, the affectionate tension in the artist between the man he turned out to be and the cultural tradition that made him is the font from which his inspiration to create art springs. But then Hlobo is equally drawn to showing the culture its fears. As fascinating as the rituals are those things that are unsayable. With each work he becomes more deft at upsetting his consciously embraced cultural traditions – so that they can be nourished, reconstructed, better seen. So it is with Umtshotsho, his new body of work. In its original sense umtshotsho refers to a traditional Xhosa youth party where boys and girls got together to dance, sing and romance each other; mock stick-fighting between the boys was also part of the gathering. Some observers like JH Soga (a learned man of Xhosa ethnicity himself) did not appreciate such practices as umtshotsho, calling it barbaric. This longstanding contestation about the value of traditions frames Hlobo’s art, a contest not only with other traditions but also found amongst amaXhosa ethnic groupings. As Hlobo correctly declares, cultures are always changing. And so are pasts. For Hlobo the aim with Umtshotsho, as in previous shows, is to trace traditional Xhosa practices and offer them to the world for enjoyment even as he questions elements of those traditions. Hlobo’s sense of play, and his feeling for the playfulness of culture, informs his Dubula, performance, 3 May 2007, Galleria Extraspazio, Rome
approach to his work. However, practices like ubukwetha (part of the Xhosa male
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Kopano Ratele
initiation practice) are not to be taken lightly. Hlobo is alive to the fact that young males have literally bled to death trying to be men; that traditional beliefs that true men must have their foreskin cut have too often been fatal. Being playful does not mean horsing around then; and it does not imply being disrespectful to traditional cultural life, as Hlobo is at pains to make clear. But without irony, he avers, the culture and traditions around masculinity, or any other set of cultural practices, are not only wearisome subjects, they are likely to lose their essential vitality and attraction to all but the initiates. I could not help laughing as I watched a video of the almost naked artist dragging a big rubber ball by his penis in Rome in 2007. Mine is laughter full of admiration for how Hlobo stripped in public and performed his art – or perhaps animated his art is a better formulation. As in Amaqanda’am, in which Hlobo, robed in white, danced and rolled around the floor with his sculptures-cum-eggs at Aardklop in 2007, this dragging of the ball with the penis gestures to something beyond the gallery, outside the borders of Italy, outside Europe, but something in which that continent is deeply implicated. What is it that Hlobo gestures to in his work? The specific references, if he did not take time to explain them to his audiences, would remain obscure because, as he observes, the culture and history being referenced are obscured by the European representational traditions that remain dominant in the art world in which Hlobo operates. Generally, his gestures always go back to his loves: his cultural and sexual heritage, his Xhosa identity and his “perversity”. Thus while he is comfortable in monumentalising Xhosa traditions, Hlobo revels in constructing a kraal made of pink ribbons that looks like a trampoline. He talks of the place of the notion of respect among amaXhosa, yet there is a constant subversiveness. Speaking of perversions, on seeing Intente on Hlobo’s first solo exhibition, he got me to thinking about the place of the fetish in the life of a culture. Traditions are Umthubi, 2006, exotic and indigenous wood, steel, wire, ribbon, rubber inner tube, 200 x 400 x 730cm (variable), detail Amaqanda’am, still from video documentation of performance, 24
of course always, in a way, fetishisations of particular objects from the many pasts of groups of people. It is easy to entertain the idea of Hlobo as a fetishist of a kind. Rather than finding erotic pleasure in an object or part of a person’s body that is
October 2007, Aardklop arts festival, Potchefstroom
not commonly connected to sex, Hlobo’s fetishism is inverted, directed at evoking
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Pride and Playfulness
Intente, 2006, rubber inner tube, ribbon, fabric, rocks, 195 x 270 x 265cm. Spier collection, Stellenbosch
something like a sexual experience in others. As he has said, “My work is always sexually charged.”1 His main aim is to provoke in others desires both disavowed and glossed by traditions. Even for a person who might consider himself on the conservative and straight side sexually, Hlobo arouses a secret craving when looking at the boots from the 2005 performance Igqirha lendlela. You want to lick. Or while standing in front of Intente, depending on one’s mood at the time, you might experience the urge to trace ever so lightly the red head of the pole, or to flick one’s fingers at it. Or to cup in your hands the two balls of Isisindo samadlozi, of which Hlobo said: “It’s about the idea of men, or some men, having the tendency to put their confidence below their belt. The idea of them feeling, I am a man, I have balls, and my dick is what really carries me around. Not using your head but using your penis. This is almost like weighing somebody’s masculinity.”2 From his first solo show at Michael Stevenson, Izele (meaning to give birth or fill something), in August/September 2006, through Kwatsityw’iziko (which refers to crossing the hearth to initiate intimacy), in March/April 2008, and now Umtshotsho, foremost among Hlobo’s aims has been to dig into traditions, get us to dig them, to present them to us as things to be appreciated as much as European traditions and cultures – if not cherished in their own right. As with any worthy spirit, the first lesson in making and communing with each of the pieces is to call it by its proper name. By giving his works titles in isiXhosa, Hlobo says he is celebrating his South African identity and gender identity. “And in that celebration of what it means to be South African, my ethnic identity is very dominant.”3 He says he takes inspiration from being a Xhosa man because “if one is celebrating or writing a story about South African culture one’s point can be easily missed if one is overly general”.
1 Nicholas Hlobo: Kwatsityw’iziko. Cape Town: Michael Stevenson. Catalogue 34 (April 2008) 2 Nicholas Hlobo: Izele. Cape Town: Michael Stevenson. Catalogue 22 (August 2006): 10. 3 This and subsequent quotes from a conversation between the artist and the author at Hlobo’s studio, May 2009.
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But there must be more to the stories Hlobo tells with his art: as postmodernist theorists have revealed about language, it is never only a medium to convey a narrative or even celebrate a culture. And indeed there is. Hlobo’s use of isiXhosa to name his works anchors his art and centres his creations. In his artistic account of being South African, isiXhosa indicates indisputably the place where he starts or ends his stories, the rock on which he founds the house he is always building.
Kopano Ratele
Truth is, it would be surprising if an artist as highly attuned to his identity and culture as Hlobo were not aware of the political contexts which produce him as an artist and in which he makes his work. It is the details that set his answers apart. The terms that Hlobo appends to his works are taken from older, formal and sophisticated forms of the isiXhosa language. These forms connect with the appearance of the works themselves. Hlobo wants to emphasise something that is important to him about being umXhosa, South African and African, something that needs presenting in a non-stereotypical, urbane manner, that reflects the contested nature of languages, both of the arts and of cultures. Like the works, the titles themselves are pieces of artistic texts. Making art to show the beauty of traditions is well and good if the culture whose traditions you celebrate accepts you unconditionally with your urges; but there is something about men who love to fuck other men that traditional forces in Xhosa culture do not find that easy to reconcile with ubuXhosa (Xhosaness). Homosexuality is felt by traditionalists to be deeply offensive and (inexplicably) unsettling to the culture. Not for Hlobo the traditionalist. Not in his body. Certainly not in his work. In fact, being a queer Xhosa man is something that gives him a complicated enjoyment rather than generating any tension in his body. That body is of course sometimes used as part of his art and he is not shy to reveal it to his audiences during his performances. Neither do queer masculinity and traditional culture rub each other the wrong way in his work. He teasingly says that he finds “in gay culture such joy and celebration in being a man”, and what demonstrates that “pride of being a man” better than being intimate with another man? He compares this with Xhosa culture, which takes such pride in manliness that it has as one of its most privileged rituals the initiation of boys into manhood. “I think Xhosa people make a fuss about being a man. And I find it fascinating. I always laugh at the idea that your penis is always your exhibit, or will be your exhibit in certain situations. I mean Xhosa people will say, ‘ilingqila lakho’ (it’s Boots from the performance Igqirha lendlela, 2005, rubber inner tube, ribbon, leather, 54 x 46 x 30cm Right top and bottom: Isisindo samadlozi, 2006, rubber inner tube, scale, ribbon, plastic tube, fabric, 225 x 90 x 60cm.
your witness).” According to Hlobo, there is no better way to understand Xhosa culture and make
SABC collection, Johannesburg
others appreciate it than by looking at queer culture, especially drag. Both, he says,
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love a masquerade; both gays and Xhosa traditionalists love dressing themselves up as something they are not. He finds elements of theatre in both which he suggests must be appreciated to understand his art. “Going back into my culture or my ethnic background,” he says, “I find that masquerade is part of the culture. For example, when one goes into initiation, you are not supposed to be seen, especially by women; they should not know who you are, especially if you are in the camp as a group, so basically you have to cover your face. Weighing that against homosexual, especially gay culture, I find with the drag queens for example, people masquerade, sort of play this game of being like a woman at the same time as they are challenging conventions and hiding themselves. Because if one is clad in make-up, wearing a dress, with fake boobs, stilettos and a wig, you can’t be yourself, you become something else, someone else. But when you change into your more conventional clothes as a man then you become someone who is known.” He also refers to the fact that, not dissimilar to drag queens taking on new names, Xhosa initiation and various other traditions demand that “you have to take on a new name which says that you have gone through this rite of passage now and we will give you another name that sort of celebrates this stage or your movement in life as a man or your movement in life as a woman”. Hlobo is aware that all cultures and traditions are at one time or another posturings. Perhaps at all times. As he observes, pretending to be something or someone else does not have to involve wearing a costume or an overt impersonation of others. “Everyone masquerades, whether you are wearing a costume or not. We have various façades for various occasions and people.” That’s not to say that people are always trying to hide from each other but that what we accept as our traditions are fabrications and that all cultures are always works in progress. The same holds for all masculinities, all sexualities and of course all identification-related practices. Girls and boys, women and men, dress up when they go to clubs or parties, exhibitions, weddings or funerals, workplaces, stadia, or in the old days when they used to go to umtshotsho. They clean up, put on make-up, wear clothes fit for the occasion, because they wish to present a certain face to others. This very idea of self-presentation with its play on concealment and revelation is skilfully captured by the ghost-like pieces called Izithunzi, the central works in Umtshotsho.
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Literally, izithunzi means shadows (singular, isithunzi, shadow or shade). It could also mean aura or gravitas. Hlobo says the making of Izithunzi arose from the fact that the custom of umtshotsho “is like a fairy tale” to him. “It is something I do not know about, that I do not have experience of. I hear of it from the older people when they talk.” Isn’t that generally what the past feels like to those who haven’t lived it? A mythical tale in which legends are created and reputations destroyed? A fantasy on which cultures are built? However important traditions are then, however central they are to our joys and pains in the present, there is always a fairy-tale quality to them, Hlobo seems to say. The rubbery ghostly forms central to Umtshotsho, stitched together with coloured ribbons, are evocative of ethereal, underwater creatures. Like practices that prevailed at a certain historical period in African cultures and have since vanished, the Izithunzi represented in Umtshotsho are meant to throw light on tradition; but as Hlobo says, he has had to combine stories he learned from the past with his own experiences in order to create them.
Kopano Ratele is professor in the Institute for Social and Health Sciences at the University of South Africa.
Ndimnandi ndindodwa, 2008, chair, vinyl, rubber inner tube, ribbon, organza, silicon, 115 x 270 x 155cm (variable). Installation view with Phulaphulani, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town
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Nicholas Hlobo: In Medias Res Jen Mergel
The red-veined sperm-cum-bat is on the kitchen table, awaiting its next handling. The side chair has been lathered to caress a sitter, and still bears the impression of bare balls in its molding green surface. A hole in the wall is an orifice to a massive slung sack leaking pink light through black pinhole pores. The lamp seethes a dark glowing warning. Familiar contours of furniture, interiors and even the body are morphed, melted, sliced, stretched, stitched and grafted with bulbous rubber Umphanda ongazaliyo, 2008, rubber inner tube, ribbon, zips, steel, wood, plaster, overall installation 274 x 576.5 x 203cm. Installation view, ICA Boston Left: Interior view
appendages and pretty satin ribbons, as if props for a mysterious drama we’ve stumbled upon mid-scene. Crafting molting images, pregnant forms and narratives in
medias res, Nicholas Hlobo choreographs situations to be dissected, signs to be decoded and tense expectations that theatrically provoke physical and psychological curiosity. This theatricality and materialist impulse is of a different sort than that attributed by American art critic and historian Michael Fried to minimalist works of the 1960s.1 Rather than spare in detail and reduced of reference, Hlobo’s materials are loaded with suggestive suspense – objects hanging or penetrating, stitches like scars highlighting a history of cuts, costumes that tether, bind or drag, often staged with dramatic lighting in installations titled with idiomatic double entendres. They conjure traditions and pasts at once beautiful and dark, or as Hlobo says “light and heavy”, that flicker through the shadows of his experience as a gay Xhosa South African. More like post-minimal American artists Robert Gober and Matthew Barney, Hlobo’s works often refer to paradoxes of identity, dynamics of power or rites of passage so specific that they beg us to puzzle through their storied references as their layers unfold. Hlobo’s theatre activates not only our phenomenological sense of bodily relation to physical material and form, but also the connotations to race, religion, nationality, gender and sexuality that our bodies and those materials and forms carry with them.
1 See Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, Artforum 5 (June 1967): 12-23.
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As a Catholic-school-girl native of Boston (capital of Puritan New England, known for its conservative, some might say prudish culture), my first encounter with Hlobo’s
Jen Mergel
Deka, 2007, plaster of Paris, blanket, ribbon, table, chair, dimensions variable Ntywilela ngaphantsi, 2006, rubber inner tube, ribbon, wooden base with wheels, leather harness, wrist and ankle cuffs, 146 x 105 x 280cm. Private collection, Johannesburg
theatrical in medias res caught me by surprise. Amid the commercial buzz and bright lights of 2007’s Armory Show art fair, his sculpture Deka (2007) seemed from another world, with a logic, narrative and context far removed from New York’s ballooning financial bubble: across the length of a simple wooden table and into the seat of a wooden chair was slung a long, thick arm of white fabric, laced with red ribbons that formed a ring around the wider end and narrowed into a cup-like form with ribbon tassels. Here was a form so detailed it implied some habitus or use (like a bicycle seat or citrus juicer’s shape), but here the use was outside of my experience. My inquiry about what it was prompted a coy invitation from gallerist Michael Stevenson: “Go ahead and try it on!” I imagine I blushed, realising instantly that the cupped end was a codpiece for wearing the long appendage at one’s crotch, at the table, on the table, under the table – however one might choose to perform one’s gender and sexuality in that moment. I sheepishly declined the offer, but was instantly struck by the power of the work’s implication – that is, the way Hlobo’s work implicated me in an implied scenario. I became an initiate, trial by fire, into the language of his material, the dialogue of his theatre. I learned Hlobo’s cultural heritage is Xhosa, whose idiomatic language and controversial circumcision rites inform his background and his work. I learned the white fabric for Deka was itself an initiation blanket for a teen circumcised into manhood, and the decorative stitching of (blood?) red at the tip of the white member became viscerally and ritually significant to me, at once reverent, playful and painful. Hlobo’s drawings and earlier sculptural works also translate decorative abstraction into symbolic realism. Their exaggerated literalism depends on immediate experience in the material world (recognisable by a Catholic School girl or not), rather than a false transcendence.2 In Hlobo’s case, his literalism is as much grounded in fluid language as material form. He titles projects in his native tongue Xhosa because, as he explained when we first met, “pure Xhosa is slipping away, the language is evolving”, yet worth preserving, sharing and exploring further.3 He exploits Xhosa’s unique idioms and double entendres, prompting us to dissect their specific origins and broader social meaning. Like these idioms that only locals “get” and outsiders only pick up by
2 Ibid. Fried’s term for minimalism is “literalism”.
immersion, we can only approach Hlobo’s work in the middle of a conversation begun
3 Interview in New York, 27 March 2007.
long ago. But Hlobo cues us when and where to pay attention.
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Nicholas Hlobo: In Medias Res
Lacing old tyre inner tubes with strands of bright satin, he highlights the dense with the delicate and the dark underside with the dressed-up. His drawing Yiphathe ngembambo (2006) – meaning “carry it in your chest” – suggests the transplant of a sick heart or Nathanial Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter”, worn by a social outcast. Like an emblem of inner burden, it implies the feeling of “keeping something behind closed doors”. Through stitches that seal and hide, Hlobo actively reveals that something is hidden – whether one’s sexuality, a nation’s apartheid history or a traditional culture’s uncertain future – drawing us to question how and why we might conceal what pains us. Hlobo is unabashed about bringing painful or unspeakable issues into the light through his visual art. Ntywilela ngaphantsi (2006), a pink-studded black leather-style harness and cuffs attached to a heavy bulbous black form, physically embodies what Hlobo calls “the baggage we carry around with us as South Africans”.4 The harness was worn by Hlobo in a performance of this burden, dragging the dark mutant appendage Visual Diary, 2008, detail showing sketches for Ndimnandi ndindodwa
“like a horse would pull a cart”. With a Xhosa title that means “to dive into the water, but also below, underneath, the private parts”, Hlobo’s work references both the sexual
William Pope.L, Drawing of Corbu Pop/War Tomahawk
theatre of S&M and the oppressive weight of a loaded history, if “the baggage becomes your master”. His work materialises the invisible and unspoken yet often felt tensions of our own insidious theatre: of pretending to forget our past or ourselves. South Africa’s European colonial history does not escape Hlobo’s inclusive eye. Incorporating examples of period furniture like claw chairs into his rubber and ribbon creations, he both acknowledges and defies the dynamics of minority rule, adopting and inverting the symbolic seat of power. Ndimnandi ndindodwa (2008) plants a phallic black rubber bodice flowing with a queenly train of organza in a throne-like chair, addressing subjects on their rightful place in a court of the new order. This work was presented on the exhibition Izele with related drawings in his Visual Diary (2008), as if an open script for the potential poses, dialogue and scenes for his works as his concepts for their creation unfolded. This pairing of sculptural form and implied performance with a backdrop of drawing and language links Hlobo’s practice to those of American artists rising to
4 See South African Art Now. Cape Town: Michael Stevenson. Catalogue 23 (December 2006): 62.
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national acclaim, like William Pope.L and Rodney McMillian, who likewise address the dynamics of race and icons of cultural “progress” through viscerally charged,
Jen Mergel
materialist works that imply an action in progress. Pope.L’s project Corbu Pops (2009) – installed in Harvard University’s Carpenter Center, the only North American building designed by Le Corbusier – recast this iconic symbol of 20th-century architectural form as the plaster head of a war tomahawk, stuck on the end of large “popsicle” sticks then dipped in black tar and used to hit the heads of an a cappella group, The Corbu Pops, who performed while wearing masks of Corbusier. Literally blackening the pristine gravity of high-modernist form with a newly defined “pop” art, Pope.L defies any unspoken rule of unquestionable authority, purity or rightness of form. Likewise, McMillian probes the stability of such pillars as the US justice system and the domestic housing market with installations combining wall-work and found furniture as sculptural form. His Supreme Court painting (2004-2006) renders the building’s façade as a limp cutout canvas pooling onto the floor. The institution’s fragility is implied, as if melting down or dissolving – along with the ideals of democracy and liberty it represents. His latest installation for the ICA Boston, Sentimental Disappointment (2009), examines the home as the symbol of the “American Dream”, now broken with the reality of defaults and foreclosures. McMillian’s installation of his own armchair, kitchen table and refrigerator, with accompanying video footage, shows the furniture blackened, pierced and slashed to shreds – the manifestation of physical, psychological and economic crisis played out as a dark drama. Like these artists, Hlobo explores how institutions might be penetrated to absorb new narratives. His 2008 installation at the ICA introduced forms resembling orifices, organs and arteries for connection and growth. Each intricate detail prompted questions about the dynamic of museum as host, and temporary art connected to and feeding on its site, parasitically or symbiotically. Umphanda ongazaliyo, a 5.5-metre sculpted sac of black rubber spliced with ribbon, zippers and tubular appendages, resembled a stomach, womb or tumour. Its title, meaning “a vessel that never fills up”, implies an insatiable need, whether from lack, siphoned leaks or wasteful excess. Patterns of holes punched in the form allowed a glow of pink light to seep into and through the sculpture’s hollow body. Suspended inches above the floor, the bulging form ends in a canal that stretches through the nearby wall and opens on the other side. Rodney McMillian, Untitled (The Supreme Court Painting),
Like an orifice or wound with veins of ribbon inlaid into the plaster, this connection
2004-2006, poured acrylic paint on cut canvas, 45.5 x 45.5cm
point suggests the gallery wall is a membrane we pass through to enter the space of
Umphanda ongazaliyo, 2008, detail
the growth or life within. Hlobo’s related work on paper extended these metaphors.
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Nicholas Hlobo: In Medias Res
Iminxeba, 2008, ribbon and rubber inner tube on Fabriano paper, 152.5 x 406.5 x 12.5cm, detail
With its sprawling stitches, Iminxeba suggested lines of communication, both clear and crossed. The title translates as “limbs of the vine” but also refers to the “grapevine” of telephone networks, whose signals traverse complex patterns worldwide to connect us across continents and cultures. His works raised questions about these links: is their flow draining or nurturing? Is their growth malignant or benign? Will this art be assimilated or rejected by the institutional body? Without drawing conclusions, Hlobo presents how such tensions may be suspended in an animated, immersive setting. With his latest installation Umtshotsho (2009) Hlobo again incorporates a play on light and questions of cultural and social connection across generations and traditions. Eight figures titled Izithunzi (shadows) form a coven of dark spirits in a symbolic gathering keeping with the rituals of Xhosa masculinity, yet their forms are lit by the red glow from an altered lamp. Titled Kubomvu, “beware”, the red light’s combined connotations of the promise of sexual pleasure with a warning against potential harm or taboo builds an insidious mystery and uncertainty into the scene. Is this a rite that affirms or subverts traditional notions of manhood? Might it celebrate multiple definitions of masculinity all at once? By presenting us with installations, performances and images that expose us to complex issues and layered narratives in medias res, Hlobo engages us to actively piece together and progressively absorb the possibility of a story with many meanings, no foregone conclusions. While pure Xhosa may be “slipping away”, his works build new dialogue that practises, questions and extends the language’s resonance in the global art context. He allows us to pick up the narrative where his works leave off, to keep it alive by discovering its past origins, its present significance and potential new scenes. With his recognition as a 2009 Standard Bank Young Artist, Hlobo is establishing himself as an artist whose forms, images and actions enact meanings at once specific and universal, speaking louder than words alone. His career is entering a highly anticipated new chapter, rich with its own narrative we may now enter in medias res.
Jen Mergel is Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, where she organised Momentum 11: Nicholas Hlobo, Vula zibhuqe, the artist’s first solo exhibition in a US museum.
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Jen Mergel
Selected Works 2005 – 2009
Umtya nethunga 2005 Rubber inner tube, ribbon, chain, plastic pipe, wood, steel 175 x 270 x 220cm Unisa collection, Pretoria Right: detail Below: Installation view with Vanity (and Fading Cloth by El Anatsui) on the exhibition In the Making: Materials and Process, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town, 2005 Vanity 2005 Vanity case, rubber inner tube, eyelets, ribbon, soap 29 x 31 x 170cm Private collection, Mauritius
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Igqirha lendlela Stills from video documentation of performance, 23 February 2006, as part of the group exhibition Olvida Quien Soy – Erase Me from Who I Am, Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas
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Igqirha lendlela 2005 Leather jacket, rubber inner tube, ribbon, blouse, bust 61 x 58 x 67cm Johannesburg Art Gallery collection
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Ndiyafuna 2006 Glass fibre, rubber inner tube, ribbon, jeans, sneakers, lace, wood 110 x 170 x 100cm Private collection, Zurich
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Unongayindoda Installation including Imtyibilizi xa yomile, In a while and Boots from the performance Igqirha lendlela Installation view, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town Private collection, Salzburg Imtyibilizi xa yomile 2006 Organza, rubber inner tube, ribbon 260 x 600 x 330cm (variable) In a while 2006 Handbag, rubber inner tube, ribbon 34 x 53 x 46cm Boots from the performance Igqirha lendlela 2005 Chitha
Rubber inner tube, ribbon
2006
43 x 52 x 43cm
Wooden dumb valet, jacket, rubber inner tube, silicon, fabric, ribbon 116 x 140 x 114cm Iziko South African National Gallery collection, Cape Town
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Umthubi 2006 Exotic and indigenous wood, steel, wire, ribbon, rubber inner tube 200 x 400 x 730cm (variable) Installation view, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town
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Umthubi 2006 Left: Installation view, .za: Giovane arte dal Sudafrica, Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena, 2008 Right: Installation view, Cape 07, Lookout Hill, Khayelitsha, Cape Town, 2007
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Umkwetha 2006 Performance at the opening of Izele, with the works (clockwise from top) Ndiyafuna, Umthubi, Isisindo samadlozi and Unongayindoda, 17 August 2006, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town Costume: Silicon, organza
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Proposal 2006 Rubber inner tube and thread on Fabriano paper 71 x 99cm Private collection, Cape Town Yiphathe ngembambo 2006 Rubber inner tube and ribbon on Fabriano paper 71 x 99cm Private collection, Seattle
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Ntywilela ngaphantsi Stills from video documentation of performance at the opening of the exhibition South African Art Now, 29 November 2006, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town Costume/sculpture: Rubber inner tube, ribbon, wooden base with wheels, leather harness, wrist and ankle cuffs, 146 x 105 x 280cm Private collection, Johannesburg
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Dubula Performance at the opening of Umakadenethwa engenadyasi, 3 May 2007, Galleria Extraspazio, Rome Right: On the rooftop of the artist’s studio, Johannesburg Costume/sculpture: Rubber inner tube, ribbon, 300 x 70 x 33cm Private collection, Asiago, Italy
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Left: Ubomvu 2004-2007 Wood, ribbon, rubber inner tube, lace 190 x 102 x 74cm Installation view with Dubula, Galleria Extraspazio, Rome Private collection, Asiago, Italy Middle: Umakadenethwa 2004-2007 Wood, ribbon, rubber inner tube 190 x 102 x 74cm Installation view with Visual Diary, Galleria Extraspazio, Rome Private collection, Rome Right: Yinxibe xa ikulingana 2004-2007 Wood, ribbon, rubber inner tube 190 x 164 x 116cm Installation view with Visual Diary, Galleria Extraspazio, Rome Private collection, Ragusa, Italy
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Amaqanda’am Performance, accompanied by musician Mathambo Nzuza, at the opening of the exhibition Summer 2007/8, 28 November 2007, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town Costume: Cotton, Broderie Anglaise Isitshaba (sculpture): Cotton, gauze, ribbon, silicone, sponge, plywood, 80 x 80 x 100cm Sindika Dokolo collection, Luanda Paper works on back wall (left to right): Nyathela, Fukama, Isabhokhwe sama, 2007
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Ungamqhawuli 2008 Performance at the opening of Kwatsityw’iziko, 6 March 2008, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town Costume/sculpture: Vinyl, ribbon, fabric, wood, synthetic ropes, pulley, hooks 155 x 125 x 64cm (excluding ropes) Private collection, Mauritius
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Visual Diary 2008 Pencil, pen, ribbon, rubber inner tube, leather and paper on fabric 235 x 1240cm Installation view, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town Private collection, London
Izinqanda mathe 2008 Saddle, ribbon, rubber inner tube, chains 130 x 138 x 105cm Installation view, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Museum collection, Port Elizabeth
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Chumisa 2008 Gauze, organza, polyester, ribbon, batting, steel cable 300 x 700 x 1000cm (variable) Installation views, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town
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Phulaphulani 2008 Ribbon, rubber inner tube, thread, fabric and iPod earphones on Fabriano paper 150 x 250cm Private collection, Mauritius
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Uzifake zatshon’ iinzipho 2008 Ribbon, rubber inner tube, organza and leather on Fabriano paper 152 x 470 x 12.5cm
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Uzifake zatshon’ iinzipho 2008 Detail
Andilibali okwendlovu 2008 Ribbon, rubber inner tube and plastic tube on Fabriano paper 150 x 282cm Private collection, Cape Town
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Jingisa 2008 Ribbon, rubber inner tube and silicon on Fabriano paper 150 x 230cm
Umphanda ongazaliyo 2008 Rubber inner tube, ribbon, zips, steel, wood, plaster Overall installation: 274 x 576.5 x 203cm (variable) Left and right: Installation views, ICA Boston Below: Installation view, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town
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Thoba, utsale umnxeba 2008 Performance at the opening of Momentum 11: Nicholas Hlobo, Vula zibhuqe, 30 July 2008, ICA Boston Costume and sculpture: Fabric, rubber inner tube, ribbon, lace, tassels, impepho mat Overall installation: 274 x 213 x 244cm
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Ngumgudu nemizamo 2008 Rubber inner tube, rubber boots, ribbon, vinyl Dimensions variable Installation view, Armory Show, New York Private collection, New York
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Installation view, Art Forum Berlin, 2008
Wombethe 2008 Rubber inner tube, organza, ribbon 20 x 60 x 250cm (variable) Private collection, Finland
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Unohombile 2008 Rubber inner tube, ribbon, leather 166 x 170 x 160cm Private collection, Padova, Italy
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Unotshe okwempundu zelawu 2009 Ribbon and rubber inner tube on Fabriano paper 260 x 150cm Right: detail
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Untitled 2009 Moleskine notebook, ribbon, rubber inner tube, lace, pen, pencil, stuffing Notebook size 14 x 9.5cm
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Iqinile, Ikhiwane, Bhaxa Installation views, Brodie/Stevenson, Johannesburg Iqinile and Bhaxa 2006 Wooden chairs, Sunlight soap, ribbon 80 x 63 x 48cm each Ikhiwane 2008 Wooden couch, Sunlight soap, ribbon 90 x 174 x 81cm
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Uhambo 2008 Installation view with (left to right) Iminxeba, Ingubo Yesizwe and Visual Diary Level 2 Gallery, Tate Modern, London Iminxeba 2008 Ribbon and rubber inner tube on Fabriano paper 152 x 406.5 x 12.5cm Ingubo Yesizwe 2008 Leather, rubber inner tube, gauze, ribbon, steel, found ball-and-claw chair leg, butcher’s hook, chain 150 x 260 x 3000cm Visual Diary 2008 Fabric, ink, pencil, paper, leather, hessian, beads, rubber gloves, ribbon and rubber inner tube 238 x 1557cm
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Ingubo Yesizwe 2008 Installation view, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town
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Umtshotsho 2009 Installation with Izithunzi and Kubomvu Works in progress photographed in the artist’s studio Izithunzi 2009 Rubber inner tube, ribbon, organza, lace, found objects, steel, couch Six of eight sculptures, approx 200 x 150 x 150cm each Kubomvu 2009 Found table, found lamp, rubber inner tube, ribbon, red light bulb 153 x 53 x 53cm
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Izithunzi 2009 Details of work in progress
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Izithunzi and Kubomvu 2009 Details of works in progress
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Izithunzi 2009 Details of work in progress
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Nicholas Hlobo
Born Cape Town, 1975; lives and works in Johannesburg Printmaking apprenticeship, Artist Proof Studio, 1998 Graduated with B Tech: Fine Art degree, Technikon Witwatersrand (now University of Johannesburg), 2002
Solo Exhibitions
Ingubo Yesizwe, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town 2008 Uhambo, Level 2 Gallery, Tate Modern, London Momentum 11: Nicholas Hlobo, Vula zibhuqe, ICA Boston, Massachusetts Kwatsityw’iziko, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town 2007 Umdudo, Aardklop Arts Festival, Potchefstroom Umakadenethwa engenadyasi, Galleria Extraspazio, Rome Idiom[s], Pei Ling Chan Gallery, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, Georgia 2006 Izele, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town 2009
Selected Group Exhibitions 2009 Beauty and Pleasure in South African Contemporary Art, Stenersen Museum, Oslo Gender, (Trans) Gender and (De) Gendered, 10th Havana Biennale, Cuba 2008
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Self/Not-self, Brodie/Stevenson, Johannesburg Mythologies, Haunch of Venison, London Farewell to Post-colonialism, Third Guangzhou Triennial, China
Nicholas Hlobo
Summer Projects 2008/9, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town Flow, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York Home Lands/Land Marks, Haunch of Venison, London Disturbance: Contemporary Art from Scandinavia and South Africa, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg Skin-to-Skin, Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg .za: Giovane arte dal Sudafrica, Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena 2007 Summer 2007/8, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town BoysCraft, Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa A Legacy of Men, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg Impossible Monsters, Art Extra, Johannesburg Cape 07, Cape Town Turbulence: Art from South Africa, Hangar-7, Salzburg 2006 South African Art Now, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town Second to None, Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town Olvida Quien Soy – Erase Me from Who I Am, Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas 2005 South African Art 1848 - Now, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town Synergy, Iziko Old Town House Museum, Cape Town Inventors, Makers and Movers, Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam In the Making: Materials and Process, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town Take Me to the River, Pretoria Art Museum, Pretoria Subject to Change, Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town Klein Karoo National Arts Festival, Oudtshoorn A Decade of Democracy: Witnessing South Africa, Florida A&M University, Tallahassee, Florida; KZNSA Gallery, Durban 2004 Jo’burg Art City, Johannesburg Development Agency, Johannesburg Negotiate: Intercession, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg Mine(d) Fields, Stadtgalerie, Bern, Switzerland A Decade of Democracy: Witnessing South Africa, Center for African-American Artists, Boston, Massachusetts; African American Museum, Dallas, Texas Show Us What You’re Made Of II, The Premises Gallery, Johannesburg 2003 Makeshift, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg 18th Absa L’Atelier Exhibition, Absa Gallery, Johannesburg
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Biography
2002
Jo’burg Art City, The Fort, Constitution Hill, Johannesburg 17th Absa L’Atelier Exhibition, Absa Gallery, Johannesburg
Awards and Residencies 2009
Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art
2007
Ampersand Foundation residency, New York
2006
Tollman Award for Visual Art
2005
Thami Mnyele Foundation residency, Amsterdam
Selected Bibliography Bosland, Joost. 2009. ‘Nicholas Hlobo in conversation with Joost Bosland’. Nka 24: 108-115 Gule, Khwezi. 2008. ‘Between Authenticity and Worldliness’. In Christine Y Kim (ed). Flow. New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem
Hlobo, Nicholas. Izele. Cape Town: Michael Stevenson. Catalogue 22 (August 2006) Hlobo, Nicholas. Kwatsityw’iziko. Cape Town: Michael Stevenson. Catalogue 34 (April 2008) Hlobo, Nicholas. ‘Umtya nethunga and Vanity.’ In Sophie Perryer (ed). In the Making: Materials and Process. Cape Town: Michael Stevenson. Catalogue 16 (August 2005) Mergel, Jen. 2008. ‘Nicholas Hlobo, Piercing Silence’. Momentum 11: Nicholas Hlobo. Boston: ICA Mosaka, Tumelo. 2004. ‘Nicholas Hlobo’. In Sophie Perryer (ed). 10 Years 100 Artists: Art in a Democratic South Africa. Cape Town: Bell-Roberts Publishing O’Toole, Sean. 2008. ‘Phalluses, saddles and South Africa: Handmade costumes and the Xhosa language’. Frieze (May 2008): 142-143 Simbao, Ruth. 2006. ‘Weighing masculinity’. Art South Africa 5(2): 38-39 Van Der Vlist, Eline. 2008. ‘Introducing Nicholas Hlobo’. Modern Painters 19(10): 66-67 Van der Watt, Liese. 2006. ‘Nicholas Hlobo’. Art South Africa 5(2): 69
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Acknowledgments Nicholas Hlobo would like to thank Standard Bank and the National Arts Festival, in particular Ismail Mahomed and Andrew Verster, and, for their ongoing support, Guido Schlinkert, Jen Mergel, Kerryn Greenberg, Clive Kellner, Laurie Ann Farrell, Naomi Beckwith, Christine Kim, Ben Tufnell, Tamar Garb, the Tollman family, Debbie Goldman, Salim Currimjee, Alexander Rhomberg, Dick Enthoven, Piet Viljoen, Josef Vascovitz, Hans Porer, Vivien Cohen, Emile Stipp, Tami Katz-Freiman, Midori Yamamura, Raffaella Guidobono, Tumelo Mosaka, Kathryn Smith, Bonita Alice, Mark Gevisser, Kopano Ratele, the staff at Michael Stevenson, Mcnight Thipa, Justin Nachipi, Trhoppher Ernest Malebati, Julius Aaron, James Cathels, Lawrence Hlobo, Nobonke Hlobo, Victoria Gabela and Linda Gabela.
Editor: Sophie Perryer Design: Gabrielle Guy Image repro: Ray du Toit Printing: Hansa Print, Cape Town Binding: Graphicraft, Cape Town
Photo credits Pages 8, 10-12, 14-16, 104 Sabelo Mlangeni / 18, 54 Courtesy of Galleria Extraspazio, Rome / 20-23, 28, 34, 35, 38, 40-43, 45, 50 Kathy Skead / 25, 29 (top), 47, 48, 51, 58-73, 74 (bottom), 82 (bottom), 84-87, 93 Mario Todeschini / 26, 27, 30 (bottom), 31, 74 (top), 75-79 John Kennard, courtesy of the ICA Boston / 29 (bottom) © William Pope.L, courtesy of the artist / 30 (top) Gene Ogami, courtesy of Rodney McMillian and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects / 46 Courtesy of Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena / 56, 57 Riccardo Ragazzi, courtesy of Galleria Extraspazio, Rome / 80, 81 Susan Alzner / 83 Joe Duggan, courtesy of Galleria Extraspazio, Rome / 88, 89, 94-101 John Hodgkiss / 90, 91 Marcus Leith and Andrew Dunkley, © Tate, London 2009
© 2009 Texts: the authors © 2009 for works by Nicholas Hlobo: the artist
Published by MICHAEL STEVENSON Buchanan Building 160 Sir Lowry Road Woodstock 7925 Cape Town info@michaelstevenson.com www.michaelstevenson.com
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ISBN 978-0-620-44135-3