ART-PRESENTATION: Donna Kukama & Nandipha Mntambo-La Matière Vivante

Two South African artists present the exhibition entitled “La Matière vivante”. Donna Kukama and Nandipha Mntambo, each artist in their own way, put material into discussion. The materia prima, is the starting point in alchemy, after which one eventually arrives at the final distillation. Bronze, copper, steel, plaster, wood, animal furs, and horns are the starting elements for the composition of their stories. What’s unique about the material is that it’s alive. It’s anchored in the present, by its materiality, but it contains a memory that dates back to eternity.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galleria Continua Archive

The work Donna Kukama and Nandipha Mntambo is firmly anchored in a memory with which they play at will. Donna Kukama interrogates this through writing and performances in which she evokes ancient times to confront them with present ones, putting them in parallel, evaluating them and taking lessons for the future from them. Nandipha Mntambo, who also uses performance as a mode of expression, puts herself at the forefront of her sculptures, using her body as a model. The language of the body has rules that sometimes escape the performer herself. In the theatre of representation, Mntambo’s work interrogates the codes of representation and the ancestral distribution of the division between man and woman that she puts back into discussion, as in the video where she interprets a matador without an opponent. I might have forgotten to mention, but it is time to correct this omission; Kukama and Mntambo are black women and both were born in Apartheid South Africa. This implies a political dimension that is more or less attached to their work. The memory from which Donna Kukama elaborates is a livid and choleric memory, as one can understand in a piece like “How powerful you must have been to be wanted bloody dead dead dead” (2020). “I will not dwell on the message contained in this work, whose title is sufficiently self-explanatory, if not to highlight the materials” claimed by the artist, including “Black Anger”. In “The walls refused to forget their bright bullet-shatters and loud-blood-spatters” (2019), we also find materials that are rarely mentioned in such a direct way: heat and memory. The writing that she uses is illegible for everyone. You would have to close your eyes for it to penetrate you. Trying to decipher it would be useless for whomever hadn’t undergone some form of initiation. It is still a question of initiation when Mntambo dresses herself in animal skins (cow) or when she shreds them to make sculptures. What is evoked is our animality and the shamanic power of those who speak with the invisible. Objects are never what they seem but they are invested with a new meaning, the subtlety of which intends to escape from conventional codes. Here, the story is no longer about Africa, but a universality that transcends geography and culture because it is anchored in a land like no other. A land where material remains what we must begin with.

Photo: Donna Kukama, Sizobaloya kwa Mai-Mai, 2019, Graphite, oil pastel, acrylic, spells and smoke on canvas 174.5 x 143.5 cm, 68.70 in x 56.49 in, Courtesy: the artist and blank projects, Cape Town

Info: Curator: Simon Njami, Galleria Continua, Via del Castello 11, San Gimignano, Italy, Duration: 29/5-31/8/2021, Days & Hours: MonSun 10:00-13:00 & 14:00-19:00 by appointment only, book here, www.galleriacontinua.com