Graced with a poetically enigmatic title, What Home Alphabets Dream Of? this solo exhibition by South African artist Kemang Wa Lehulere asks us to contend with the imposed limitations and unseen possibilities of individual and collective freedom in the aftermath of oppressive rule. As in the case of democratic South Africa, freedom is merely a notion as post-apartheid conditions prevail. Despite the fundamental changes that have occurred in the country on a structural level, its people are still coiled in an unfathomable bind which affects their experience of the world and each other.
This exhibition engages with the rife complexities that define the character of the nation of South Africa and its people. Wa Lehulere directs our attention to this post-apartheid condition, with a particular inquiry into the embattled education system. Education is the backbone of society. It is a system that shapes a nation’s cultural foundations, drives its economic production, and promotes civil engagement. In the Republic of South Africa, education remains a challenging topic and an unpleasant reality. The country continues to reel from its inherited education system, despite the fact that the right to education is enshrined in the modern nation›s constitution. The ignominious Bantu Education system, which denied Black South Africans access to educational services during apartheid, remains a core cause of this challenge.
As a result of this imposed system, Black South Africans were deprived of employment and other socioeconomic opportunities. These effects persist in the socio-political and cultural development amongst pre- and post-apartheid generations. Little is said of these repercussions, not only of Bantu Education, but also of the aftermath of apartheid on collective and individual sensibilities. These are the impalpable elements that are often disregarded. With a strong aptitude for historical consciousness, Wa Lehulere’s work intervenes in this precise locus, illuminating unstated and oftentimes invisible truths. He impels us to contend with the ubiquitous cobwebs that entrap the nation’s people through revolving corridors that constitute the past, present and future continuum of phenomenological time.
The works in this exhibition, at the level of immediate perception, appear as an eclectic constellation of obscure sculptural forms containing wood, steel, shoelaces, ribbons and indecipherable marks found on the solid material. Almost symbolic of the country’s famous moniker, the ‘rainbow nation’—a diverse melting pot of cultures and people—the work can be read as an assemblage of reconfigured common objects and materials synthesised into a cryptic composition.
Wa Lehulere has an order for this circuit of objects, geared towards a renewed paradigm for freedom—one that is willed and enabled at the level of the distribution of the senses. In these works, Wa Lehulere engages a notion of freedom that seeks to unmoor the human subject from apartheid’s seemingly invisible cord.1
The school desk, an object synonymous with formal education, emerges as a central device in approaching this subject. Through his interventions, Wa Lehulere dismantles the object before reinscribing its parts with new properties, ultimately grounding the composition in the form of birdhouses. A birdhouse serves as an artificial enclosure for birds to safely construct nests, raise their young, and provide shelter from severe weather and predators. This remaking functions as a symbol of release from the constraints structured by the classroom environment. The notion of birds, with their capacity for flight and movement beyond confinement, further suggest a liberatory framework premised on the transcendence of immediate and far-reaching physical and non-physical limits.
The image of the birdhouse is extended through the reconfiguration of the rainbow as a figurative element. A phenomenon of nature often read as embodying a sense of wonder, the rainbow acquires a deepened significance through a reading of the ‘rainbow nation’. A designation associated with Anglican archbishop and anti-apartheid figure Desmond Tutu, the term is used to characterise a diverse and multicultural society. The shapes that expand into a rainbow-like form also possess a musicality, especially in how the musical instrument of the marimba is conjured in the mind through the assumed shapes. The inclusion of dreamcatchers further evokes a whimsical and magical sensibility that shifts perception beyond the immediacy of the present reality into the realm of the mythical or esoteric. These sculptural representations carry a tone of triumph and hope, articulated through the processes of deconstruction and reconstruction that underpin their making. The works speak directly to the post-1994 South African project of nation-building, grounded in the attempt to reconstitute a new humanism following the division and violence endured by countless South Africans under apartheid.
The artist’s aunt is his collaborator in this series of works, albeit a silent collaborator. Her hand emerges literally in casts, gesticulating various sign language alphabets. His aunt was unfortunate to fall victim to the violence of the apartheid government, having suffered a gunshot to the head while protesting Bantu Education during the Soweto Uprising of 1976. She never recovered from this injury, lost her full capacity of speech, and has spent most of her life refusing to speak about the incident or apartheid at large. Wa Lehulere grew up with this knowledge, and although he didn’t grow up at the height of apartheid, he witnessed its violence through his family members and those surrounding him. This aspect of the work is partially inspired by the film Zulu Love Letter, directed by Ramadan Suleiman and written by the late Bhekisizwe Petersen. The film recounts the story of a woman who was detained by the apartheid police while pregnant and subsequently gave birth to a daughter who was mute. In doing so, it reflects on the ways in which trauma and memory are transmitted across generations, foregrounding their enduring and transgenerational effects. The hand casts by Wa Lehulere’s aunt tell a similar story.
Wa Lehulere insists on a unified reading of the work, like reading alphabets—fractured but connected. A material layer that encourages this method of engagement, a conceptual thread imbricated in the works, are shoelaces. Through its suggestion of the school uniform, the shoelaces implicate the human. As a mode of attire meant to instil a sense of uniformity, regulate behaviour and produce collective sensibility, it indicates an imposition of physical control over the person.
Striking too are the colours painted onto the wooden fragments. It mimics the palette of Chappies bubblegum, its different hues and flavours, which school learners across the country still chew on to placate their boredom or to stave away hunger. Teachers often scold learners for chewing gum in class and, as a result, it often ends up under desks’ tops; fossilising and hardening. This becomes allegorical of the manner in which education, through its systematic processes of discipline and punishment, hardens people and destroys imagination.
A series of photographic stills, captured from his video work Homeless Song Number 4, accompanies the sculptural objects and furthers the inquiries embedded in the exhibition. The artist has his back to the camera, facing a blackboard. Projected onto his back are alphabets in sign language. When stitched together, it combines into an alphabetical system. The blackboard continues the thread of objects associated with the classroom and serves as a medium of instruction, dissemination and a prelude to punishment. Wa Lehulere’s body assumes a different posture that is in relation to the alphabet that is projected on his back. This relationship between signification and somatic expression renders visible the effects of structural violence on the individual body. Because of this, the photographs allude to the manner in which trauma resides in the body and inscribes itself onto it. The artist uses his body as an archival modality and the last site of resistance. It draws out a larger account on our memories as reaching beyond abstract thoughts that live purely in the recesses of our minds. Our bodies harbour our painful and traumatic experiences, stored in different compartments of our physiological make-up.
Wa Lehulere grounds the title of this exhibition in the idea of alphabets as structured systems of signification, mediating how humans perceive and make sense of the world around them and thereby determining forms of communication and relation. This is to emphasise the levels of symbolism that are embedded in this work. He amalgamates the school desk, the birdhouse, the dreamcatcher, and the rainbow while underwriting it with the alphabetic system. This is a compelling aggregation of layering, demonstrative not only of the elasticity of the artist’s mind, but also of the intricately sedimentedm conditioning of the education system on consciousness.
At its core, this exhibition calls for an unlearning. An unlearning that needs to happen in parallel with a process of undoing. It urges for a dismantling of the institutions and systems of old that have reoriented our sensibilities, seeking to oppress and subjugate us. It is a signal to rethink these systems and take on the work to reconfigure what we thought we knew as we reanimate ourselves and our imaginations. Wa Lehulere deconstructs the school desks and reinterprets this disciplinary object, giving it alternative artistic forms and reconsidered meanings as a needed provocation and reminder. The provocation hidden in his proposition is to question the certitudes that we hold and why it is that we hold them. He reminds us that we are still paying the price of freedom. An illusory freedom. A freedom that we have not gained.
Exhibition text by Dr Phokeng Setai, Interdisciplinary Cultural
Practitioner and Assistant Curator, Zeitz MOCAA.
1Lalu, P., 2023. Undoing Apartheid. Cambridge: Polity Press
