Wits End

The (dis)comfort of (un)certainty

You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone ... A refrain that echoed through most of 2020 and 2021, as we all bemoaned the activities – from daily comforts to grand adventures – that we had taken for granted until the great COVID pause. For staff and students at universities around the world, these included the small pleasures of campus life. Witsies have rediscovered them in 2022, despite the blended learning and hybrid home/ office models that have come to characterise our collective new normal.

I haven’t spent as much time on Wits campus this year as I would have liked. And I have lost touch with the flâneur’s art: wandering somewhere (or nowhere in particular) with a keen eye and ear, taking it all in, observing and listening or just feeling vaguely connected to the people and place around you. So it was with a quiet thrill that I found myself strolling through the Wits School of Arts, puzzling over the architectural quirks of its eclectic cluster of buildings, tuning into snippets of conversation between gesticulating smokers, admiring the focus of a spray-painting artist, catching a few bars of a saxophone solo drifting down from a window somewhere above me.

All this activity could proceed without electricity. Not so the final leg of my journey. My destination was the Wits Art Museum (WAM); between me and Donna Kukama’s exhibition Ways-of-Remembering-Existing lay a sliding glass door whose ability to open and close could not be confidently predicted. Load shedding had played havoc with the usually reliable Wits backup electricity supply and thus with the automated entrance to WAM. The bemused security personnel told me they’d happily let me in but there was no guarantee that I’d be able to get out. I decided it was worth the risk.

Such are the exigencies of living in South Africa. In fact, scratch that. Such is the state of perpetual uncertainty that comes with being alive anywhere in the world in 2022; all is precarious, it seems, unmoored, unstable. We Humanities academics love to theorise about this, of course. We talk about “radical contingency” and “epistemic insecurity”. Using apt words in deft ways can be quite reassuring – things somehow make more sense.

But sometimes you just have to face the not-knowing. And here Kukama’s work is simultaneously provoking and consoling.

Once the generators kicked in and WAM’s lights went back on, I approached Ways-of-Remembering-Existing via another exhibition in the central atrium: Her Eye on The Storm, a tribute to Gisèle Wulfsohn (1957-2011) curated by Beathur Mgoza Baker. Wulfsohn’s reportage and portrait photography may be situated in the familiar South African representative mode of documentary realism. It is, in its own way, a form of sense-making, of framing and narrating, even if it does so through suggestion rather than overdetermined explanation.

Kukama, by contrast, seeks to disrupt “existing narratives of history and traditional modes of storytelling”. In her research and creative practice as a doctoral candidate, as the text accompanying her exhibition affirms, she introduces texts and objects “whose grammar is opacity and ephemerality”. For Kukama, mutual understanding between writer and reader, or artist and viewer, is not a desirable end. She wants us to dwell in the discomfort of being unsure, of having meaning and clarity slip away from us.

This applies as much to her live performance art interventions as it does to the videos, paintings and sculptures that record, respond to or complement them. Performance art, in particular, resists answers to the questions that those who encounter it may pose. Why is she doing this? Who is it for? What does it mean? You can see these questions etched into the faces of those observing some of Kukama’s recorded performances. Her own expression, by contrast, remains silently stoical – in protest, in character, in earnest.

Yet there is also something playful in the work of any performance artist. To the question, Why?, the artist answers, Why not? There must be something impish in the intervention – implying a series of questions posed by the artist and aimed at us in return: Why do you think I’m doing this? Who isn’t it for? What does it mean to you? And these questions, carefully considered, spur us towards introspection. We think anew about our public roles and private lives, the histories we have inherited, the way we see ourselves as citizens, our experiences of complicity and of freedom.

In the end, I made it out of WAM easily enough. But I was better prepared for my next confrontation with the unknown and the uncertain – on Wits campus, on the streets of Johannesburg, or wherever epistemic insecurity may strike.

See more: https://blankprojects.com/donna-Kukama

Chris Thurman is Professor in the English Department and Director of the Tsikinya-Chaka Centre (School of Literature, Language and Media) at Wits.