Stellenbosch Triennale: From the Vault

Amarhoqololo:
six feet away from illegibility

Yinto enganasihlahla, engantsingiselo, where it begins, intersects or ends can’t be fully grasped, enemboniselo engeyiyo and as such Amarhoqololo are pure abstraction.

Six feet away from legibility, contemplates the effects of the 1913 natives land act that restricted land ownership for black citizens, only allowing them to own their final resting place, which is six feet below the ground. Amarhoqololo is an isiXhosa word denoting illegibility and or the unrecognisable. The works explore the inner universe, psychological or unconscious realm with the intent to delve into a child-like form of excavation to express the invisible and unseen. While this position intentionally expresses illegibility, it is also aware of the claims as contradictory while searching for meaning and sense making in what cannot be deliberately ciphered.

Amarhoqololo are a genius nonsensical scribbling, sitting between the line of child-like innocence and Black psychosis. It is in this liminal space where Kemang wa Lehulere’s paintings straddle, a compositional place of Black geographies exploring the impulse of sound and image. In this liminality and compositional place, his works hold mirrors to the landscape paintings and sculptures from the Rupert Museum collections as a critical reading of space and the experience that comes with it. Asking, what does it mean to express the unseen or even attend to do so visually? What does it mean to deliberately express that which cannot be expressed? Featured collection pieces are by WH Coetzer (1900-1983), Jan Buys (1909-1985), Cecil Higgs (1898-1986) and Anton van Wouw (1862-1945), to name but a few. 

Placed in intimate distance with the collection, the mark making here is a tempo of improvised rhythm via abstraction, contemplating whether one gets to abstract themselves into being and nothingness while striving to be whole.

In a way, Amarhoqololo is the holding of cognitive and intellectual short circuits, a rehearsal in attempts of remaking the world as a form of liberation from the tyranny of the world.These paintings are a futile gesture towards understanding the effects of the 1913 land act and how abstraction as a code that distills the ideas from the events can at the same time create a space for freedom to function beyond representational politics.

Chief Curator: Khanyisile Mbongwa
Assistant Curator: Dr Mike Tigere Mavura

View the opening of this exhibition here. 
Click here for more information on the Stellenbosch Triennale.