VUSUMZI NKOMO: Discordant Infrastructure and other minor gestures

Discordant Infrastructure and other minor gestures, a solo exhibition by Vusumzi Nkomo.

Exhibition opening: 6pm Wednesday 9 April 2025

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In his latest solo, Discordant Infrastructure and other minor gestures, Cape Town artist Vusumzi Nkomo explores the continuities between climate, political economy and racial violence using a range of meaning-rich found objects. Nkomo is described as “one of [the] key thinkers” of the city’s art scene by Sean O'Toole, in a recent article featured in Art Forum. O’Toole also describes his practice as being part of “a lineage of austere, non-referential sculpture freighted with social implications. His method of using everyday things…links him to contemporary artists like [Moshekwa] Langa, Igshaan Adams, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Nicholas Hlobo and Kemang wa Lehulere.”

Nkomo has work included in a major museum exhibition by Nolan Oswald Dennis at Zeitz MOCAA. His work features in the Kilbourn collection (South Africa) as well as the Vilsmeier Linhares / Brain Lab collection (Munich, Germany).

The current exhibition by Vusumzi Nkomo Discordant Infrastructure and other minor gestures on show at Everard Read Cape Town is the latest expression of a recurring preoccupation Nkomo has with anti-blackness as a structural ordering principle of the modern world system. Building on from his two solo exhibitions within the last year (Ityala Aliboli at AVA Gallery and Propositions for Dis-order at THK in September of 2024), and by materializing a set of violent concepts, Nkomo has now declared himself a systems theorist par excellence. The staging of these objects in space, the activation of the negative space between the objects, the mediating relation played by the gallery itself, all serve to make the Discordant Infrastructure unnerving in ways that can quite literally be felt in the air. From the manipulation of the very atmosphere in the gallery space, to the objects and performances within its walls, the exhibition pushes at the limits of critique by confronting the totalizing violence of modernity and its instruments and institutions of domestication.

One striking feature of Nkomo’s practice is the diversity of media, materials, and objects – infrastructural materials associated with the built environment provide the scaffolding for organic matter: a metal shelf displays test tubes of plant cuttings; an electrical refrigerator mechanism (?) continually blows cold air into the exhibition space, maintaining the optimal conditions for the seed bank-seed library and cuttings and seeds to survive and grow. The natural matter finds its way into the show as mechanized, domesticated, serialized, codified, processed, commodified and prepped for exchange. Through Nkomo’s seed bank-seed library, the gallery is made the site of exchange through the trade of seedlings and cuttings. Nkomo offers gallery goers the opportunity to bring their seeds, create a log for their offering through the coding software of a highly bureaucratic website where their exchange is catalogued. In return, the seller is given some cuttings of presumably equal value. In a previous work, Nkomo had demonstrated how the social field (the symbolic order) is reliant on our participation for its reproduction, and how easy it is to nudge the audience into participating in the playing/social/psychic field of violence. This time, the game is explicitly economic, and the processes of circulation and exchange happen without requiring much nudging at all.

Artists engaged in the work of criticism typically follow the impulse of finding ways to subvert the market logic of the gallery, and by doing so, only serve to help the institution avoid being reduced to what it is, to what Nkomo has termed a ‘marketplace of contemplation.’ Nkomo’s practice is, I maintain, an effort to end the desire to give the violence of capital increasingly complicated veils or forms of fantasy that prevent us from seeing it precisely as it is, for what it is. To stage a performance that the artist imagines might resist capture is to miss the point of capitalist abstractions entirely: the institution, the field, frames what it contains, everything within it is always already captured. To stage the everyday practice of exchange, then, is to demonstrate how we are all implicated (by mere participation) in the (infra-)structure of violence.

The interplay between the living matter and the hard and sterile brick and metal infrastructure demonstrates that things are growing, moving, changing inside the ecosystem of things, but they do so only within an already determined and limiting system. Movement is ultimately determined by the system that organizes it, and it is the system that determines the coordinates of what is possible. What we experience is the illusion of (ex-)change, inside a structure that allows for difference, for life, but only in the ways that it deems fit, only as an object within a system of objects. The overlapping political, social, and economic ecosystem that reproduces and makes possible ongoing forms of capital accumulation is the experience Nkomo situates us in, and ultimately, sells us.

The ubiquity of exchange as a practice governing natural life is represented in several other objects in the show, pointing to the fact of the infrastructure of violence that scaffolds circulation (of bodies, material, commodities, etc). In one piece, A stack of abstraction IV (2025), a collection of black bricks are organized into a cube structure, providing a platform for Eve Palmer’s A field guide to the trees of Southern Africa (1972). At first glance, the black cube is too easily available for metaphor: a slave auction block, a minstrel stage, a prison cell, a soap box, an RDP house. In fact, the cube is an arrangement of Dutch ‘klompie’ bricks painted black to resemble the iron ballast used to weigh down a cargo ship, itself then traded (sometimes for slaves) as a commodity upon arrival, another central feature of Nkomo’s earlier work. The bricks were brought to the Cape to replace the inferior local clay and used by the Dutch for its colonial infrastructural operations, yet another reference to the field of play, the ground of possibility, as alien to those who will be reduced to ossified static objects within it.

Another ‘living dead’ object in the exhibition is the book-made-brick of the first recorded Xhosa novel, uSamson written by S. E. K. Mqhayi, published in 1907. The brick – now red in colour – contains no pages, no story save for the traces of its existence, the legend that it once circulated and found a readership, and is now a static object with only an embossed title on what we imagine to be its cover, its missing ISBN a reminder of its ghostly presence.

Surrounded by dead symbols in the current exhibition, juxtaposed with several references to the ocean (the passage that made Africans into dead objects for exchange), one is forced to ask: is the reproduction of the incessant and unyielding codification through the reproduction of the serial number not the still-life drawing of racial capitalist modernity? Are the serial numbers that make surveillance and sterilization possible, the invention and mapping of a singular world, homogenizing difference into abstract categories, reduced to numbers within a set, nothing more than the underlying fascist impulse beneath modern liberal democracies? Was this not Aimé Césaire’s major insight: that fascism is capitalism’s telos, that it is nothing more than colonialism turned inward? At this point, it would be important to remember that governmentality, and the study of public administration as an essential form of governance and statehood finds its South African roots in the political requirement to domesticate the native, effectively the policy-making process known then as Bantu Administration.

The practice of domesticating and controlling the native finds its most violent expression in the overtly spatial dimension of Apartheid. Racial violence is ultimately a question of dimension: where and when will the native be, or rather, in what space and time can the blacks be contained? Nkomo’s earlier repurposing of Apartheid ‘language maps’ littered with black dots uncovered the mechanism of displacement as both deliberate and arbitrary, combining language and cartography in the process of administration and governance. The dots, once two-dimensional, gradually took on a game form in his staging of a game of marbles, Proposition for dis-order: amabhastiri (2024). The marbles in Discordant Infrastructure are now seen as black three-dimensional spheres hanging from the ceiling. By resituating them they become groundless, suspended, falling, hovering, hanging, recalling Cornelia Parker’s 1999 sculpture, Hanging Fire (Suspected Arson).

Nkomo’s games, reminiscent of the sculptures of Gabriel Orozco, presume an equal playing field, an objectivity upon which the game is played, but they also call to mind the founding myths of the appearance of equality. The games rely on contingency, probability, arbitrariness, and yet, produce the belief that they can be played and won “fair-and-square,” because each of us are equally at the mercy of a Divine dice. The game mediates the shift from equal participants to a winner-loser hierarchical relation. Unless by some mutually recognizable cunning, the loser has no recourse to contest their position, having accepted that this possibility exists for anyone at the outset. The loser can only attempt to change his position by consenting to a rematch. With every repetition, the loser begins the game again, now from the position of loser, rather than from the presumed equality from which he begins the inaugural game, the odds stacked against her cumulatively with each attempt.

We find only one game in Discordant Infrastructure: a language game. The index, Indexing in windsweep (2025), as an ossified list reinvokes the seriality we encounter throughout the exhibition. By presenting the words as a reified list, the words become abstract empty containers, without living meaning. The game, a spelling bee, takes place between Nkomo and his collaborator Ndumi Mbala. Nkomo reads out a word, Mbala does the labour of deciphering which sense of the word Nkomo wants, which spelling he might prefer, how his voice contorts the word, how she might decide on the correct spelling that conforms to ‘the desire of the other.’ This becomes a game of misinterpretation, misreading, miscommunication, of second-guessing. What does the other want from me? What does the black conceptual artist force me to confront?

Moreover, the work of sliding signifiers is especially relevant in the moment in which words do not cohere. When a constitution can declare a black person free, and at the same time, make it available for violence, dispossession, and premature death with impunity, we come to realise that ‘free’ does not guarantee any protection for the colonized in the way it does for the settler. This is what Sharpe calls the anagrammatical: “As the meanings of words fall apart, we encounter again and again the difficulty of sticking the signification. This is Black being in the wake. This is the anagrammatical.” It is also what Saidiyah Hartman explains by asking how subjugation is reinforced in the moment in which personhood is granted to the slave. By invoking the figure of Ceclia the slave (who is granted personhood only in the instance in which she is classified as criminal), ‘legal person’ can only ever mean ‘criminal.’ In line with Samo Tomši?, the signifier is as autonomous as the object, bearing no relation to the use-value of the object or word, merely empty abstractions exchanged and circulating in a world (field, system, symbolic order) dominated by circulation.

Through the connections between systemic racial violence, abstraction, and capitalist enjoyment, we arrive at another of Nkomo’s central concepts: speculation and disaster. The earlier reference to the ballast that reappears in this exhibition was inspired by the discovery of the São José shipwreck off the coast of Camps Bay. Of interest here, is how actuarial science in particular finds its roots in risk mitigation and disaster management directly born out of the trade of/in human cargo. By inventing a practice of underwriting during maritime trade, the contingencies of the natural world can be managed, controlled, and accounted for through insurance, and capital can be secured against the temperaments of Fortuna. As such, value is secured not only by what can be contained in the here and now, but even more importantly, by capturing the future. Nkomo’s preoccupation with risk mitigation and financial abstractions animated by the São José shipwreck brings to light precisely the concrete dimensions of the maintenance of black death (actual and social) that continues to operate under the guise of objectivity and universal equality.

To secure future value, insurance comes to undergird the trade of slaves across uncertain and rough seas, but coinciding with this practice is the development of meteorology and weather forecasting. The interplay between organic matter and the built environment in Nkomo’s works is the same overlapping of the ecological-economic system, the subordination of life to the insatiable requirements of capital accumulation, a system of circulation and reproduction. And this is ultimately how Nkomo comes to manipulate the atmosphere of the gallery. Nkomo touches on what Sharpe means when she writes that, “In what I am calling the weather, antiblackness is pervasive as climate.” To experience Discordant Infrastructure on the top floor of Everard Read, gallery goers are forced to enter through a plastic curtain typical of an abattoir entryway, where we anticipate that something is being processed. Nkomo’s manipulation of the atmosphere of the gallery, by deliberately lowering the thermostat, makes of the entire space an experiment akin to Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube (1963-1965); a closed ecosystem of violence, and we are all on the inside, keeping it alive. The ‘cruelly cold’ temperature of the gallery is meant to provide the perfect conditions for the survival of the commodities prepped for exchange, but it also mimics the weather at the time in which the parliament of South Africa is passing the Land Act that codifies the dispossession of land for black people, coincidentally, in the same year as the establishment of Everard Read Gallery: 1913. There is indeed something callous, something cruelly cold, about this discordant fact of history. While blacks were losing the last semblance of their dignity, in the heart of winter, whites were given art, presumably, for its own sake.
As part of his practice, Nkomo has requested that the gallery provide a meticulous report for each day that the exhibition is up, of the exact internal conditions of the gallery. The perverse requirement for this hyper bureaucratized administering – times, movements, temperature changes, condition of the seeds and cuttings. The totalitarian practice of administration and governmentality is the perfect gift to the gallery, nothing more or less than the requirement that it be itself: an institution of domestication, a space of capture and catalogue, a marketplace of contemplation, a mechanism through which the system (economic, ecological, political, social, linguistic) is maintained.

In closing, Nkomo’s descriptions of his interventions as ‘minor gestures’ is misleading; if anything, the gestures are minor only because they are quotidian. But to point to the manifestations of a fixed structure, one that acts upon the artist, determines what can and cannot be done within its walls, how he must be alienated to participate, how he must find a mode of alienation-enjoyment, to point to the invisible structures that hold us in the wake, are minor only insofar as are usually obscured. What is the magnitude of the gesture that aims to expose the invisibility of subjugation, that points to the climate that conditions violence?

As stated before, Nkomo’s questions are ultimately about the foundations, the ground, the basic presuppositions that must be asserted as objective truth for the abstractions to be possible. Even more, he asks about those processes – cognitive and concrete – that serve to veil these violent historical presuppositions. Nkomo calls into question the modes of enjoyment, leisure, beauty, protection, that we might come to defend because the violence of their roots are abstracted and obscured from us. But what happens when this veil is pierced? What forms of disorder become possible when we expose the abstract myths that provide a psychic reprieve from the violence of the everyday?

These gestures are anything but minor, for to point to a system or structure, is to call everything into question.

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Text by Ziyana Lategan