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).

Unsurprisingly, then, books and words figured strongly in the compact, materially diverse, and sometimes interactive works in Nkomo’s exhibition “Propositions for dis-order.” Proletarian materials and a homemade aesthetic are hallmarks of his dialogic work, a practice he has routinely pitched as “situated in the intersection between art and politics.” A stack of abstraction II, 2022–24, a floor-based piece, consists of a paperback edition of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk (1903) placed on a concrete plinth next to a portable voice recorder set on a rust-cultured canvas treated with floor polish. This squat audio installation had a samizdat quality. Dead Library, 2023–, presents a jokey simulacrum of nearly two dozen colonial books, among them Swedish naturalist Anders Sparrman’s Travels in the Cape 1772–1776,Volume 1, each re-created in faux-naive style in concrete, with floor and shoe polish and acrylic paint. Installed at intervals across the gallery, Fundamental phantasy I–IV, 2024, comprised decorative glass panels, each with stenciled quotes made from paper, foil, and Scotch tape. One panel bore a line from Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952): ONE IS NOT BLACK WITHOUT PROBLEMS. The sentimental title of white South African novelist Alan Paton’s 1981 book was critically reimagined by substituting the word wound for land: AH, BUT YOUR WOUND IS BEAUTIFUL.

This exhibition opened only two months after Nkombo’s debut solo, “Ityala aliboli” (loosely, an unerasable debt—the artist offers “a debt that doesn’t wither away, rot or die”), held at the Association for Visual Arts, a storied not-for-profit gallery in Cape Town. The earlier show explored the longue durée of racial slavery through the wreck of the Portuguese slaver ship São José Paquete d’Africa, which sank off the coast of Cape Town in 1794. Roughly half of the nearly five hundred enslaved Mozambicans aboard drowned, and many among the survivors were sold in South Africa. From this blighted history Nkomo derived both a key working material, salt, as well as a thematic interest in time, risk, and value. “Propositions for dis-order” included four salt works, among them White Square, 2023, a self-descriptive piece made from salt and white concrete. My Sentimentality Extends the Length of a Coin IV, 2024, consists of a length of rope extending from a metal plate filled with salt solution to a pulley mounted on the wall. Over time, the salt solution creeps up the rope and crystallizes. “The salt solution is so undisciplined and mobile,” remarked Nkomo at a walk-through of his earlier exhibition. “It spreads and becomes multiple things, [inviting] deep engagement with time, money, risk.” A Pile of Time: Salt Cubes, 2024, is a low sculpture composed of salt blocks assembled into a kind of LeWittian incomplete open cube. Near it was a similarly stumpy work, A Stack of Abstraction III, 2024: paving bricks forming a base to display a copy of dendrologist Eve Palmer’s 1972 field guide to southern African trees. 

This botanical theme was rehearsed in the interactive work Propositions for dis-order: Playing pétanque with cannon balls, 2024, an installation incorporating a potted snake vine (a climbing plant endemic to Australia) adjacent to a horizontal spread of outdated maps forming the field for a boules-like game with polish-blackened balls. The theme was also evident in A garden for dis-order, 2024: three mirrored planters housing cuttings of snake vines installed on squares like those of Carl Andre. Formally, many of Nkomo’s works suggest affinities with post-Minimalism and Conceptualism. But Nkomo is wary of visual pigeonholing; anyway, likenesses and approximations don’t do justice to his materially probative and idea-rich practice that draws sustenance from Black thinkers.

Read the full review here: https://www.artforum.com/events/sean-otoole-vusumzi-nkomo-thk-gallery-1234724258/