Among the exceptional, singular and, yes, occasionally awful, artworks in the permanent collection of the South African National Gallery, one work stands out as truly enigmatic.

It is an untitled paper installation principally composed of repurposed cement packaging that Moshekwa Langa found on the streets of KwaMhlanga, the short-lived capital of the KwaNdebele homeland, shortly after finishing high school in 1993

This canonical work appears on the must-see exhibition surveying Langa’s category-resistant practice at A4 Arts Foundation in Cape Town. Titled How to Make a Book, it declares its purpose — there is an in-depth publication on the artist in the works.

The works on show at A4 span the period 1995 to 2018. There are a half-dozen pieces from the 1990s, when Langa emerged — self-taught, fully formed and fax-enabled — on the local art scene. They include Dor, a speculative flag made for a 1998 exhibition in Rotterdam, Holland, as well as his untitled paper installation from 1995.

Three wires running obliquely across the central gallery of A4 display about 20 unbleached fragments of irregularly shaped paper that Langa recycled from discarded cement packaging.

“First you invent the country; then, if you can, an economy,” wrote American journalist Joseph Lelyveld in 1985 of KwaNdebele, a proxy state being built in a hurry. 

Read the full article here: https://mg.co.za/friday/2024-11-04-the-sculptures-where-nothing-is-true-and-everything-is-permitted/ 

Vusumzi Nkomo is an integral part of Cape Town’s small but vital downtown art scene, and possibly one of its key thinkers, too. Trained as a journalist in Gqeberha, South Africa, Nkomo changed tack in 2021 when he enrolled in Cape Town Creative Academy, a private art school. Meanwhile, he has continued to write polemical, erudite essays and reviews of contemporaries such as Grada Kilomba and Cinga Samson, often quoting Afropessimist social theorist Frank Wilderson III. He has also performed in galleries as part of the band Dead Symbols (with musician Fernando Damon and artist Rowan Smith), typically reading from canonical Black texts, such as journalist Bloke Modisane’s Blame Me on History (1963).