Themba Khumalo’s exhibition at the Red Room Gallery, dubbed The Place called Home, is unlikely to attract headlines. Not because they are unlikeable. His broody landscape drawings are well-executed in charcoal, in a medium and manner we can’t help but associate with William Kentridge.
The scale of them ensures a visual and undeniable emotive impact – our nostalgic attachment to the African veld. They usher you into our rural heartlands; large rolling clouds sweeping across vacant flat fields interrupted by telephone lines. A closed petrol station is enveloped in the darkness of night in a work titled Safe Zone. The interplay between safety and danger are given expression through a contrast between lightness and darkness, evoking a tussle between good and evil, hope and loss. A universal battle, but one inflected with current socio-political conditions. Khumalo is one of few artists delivering this view, quietly, subtly.
His empty landscapes are unobtrusively disturbing. The absence of colour, beauty, wonder, or even transcendence in these barren fields, overshadowed by large brewing storms, suggests impoverishment, hopelessness and a looming crisis. This is the calm before the storm, so to speak.
Yet Khumalo is hardly delivering an obvious message about our socio-political life. There is no naked president writhing in the lap of his benefactor in the mode of Ayanda Mabulu’s art or in the vein of the sledgehammer satire of Brett Murray or cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro.
Speaking loudly and obviously has got them noticed. Made their work appear relevant because it is a topic of discussion. It probably was expected; after decades of censorship and couching political commentary in clever metaphors artists and political commentators were bound to test the limits of our democracy.
Artists are now free to blatantly depict their abhorrence for the state or our president and they are trying on that freedom for size. However, in the face of growing dissatisfaction with the head of state, who so often diffuses the impact of those works by evoking the very limits of freedom of expression artists are testing, maybe another approach, a more subtle one is required.
At least this was the idea floated recently on 702 radio by Eusebius McKaiser, one of its opinionated hosts, who, reflecting on the constant brouhaha caused by Shapiro’s satire, stated that he preferred less obvious means of visual expression. One that quietly tapped you on your shoulder was the new order of the day, he suggested.
Khumalo’s works at the Red Room gallery in Cape Town, aren’t all "quiet". Take the State of a Nation triptych, featuring a burning car, alluding to service delivery and #feesmustfall protests. Or what about the work hauntingly titled: Dead, Dead, Dead, which depicts the crying figure of a woman running towards what appears to be a body, that fixes this dystopian vibe? Loss, suffering and violence underpin Khumalo’s titular “home” - his country, the rural "home", the heart of our national psyche. Khumalo isn’t interested in ridiculing politicians but drawing out the psychic fallout of such an unequal society.
Few artists have grappled with this or depicted the extreme poverty that is often only obvious when you travel through rural settings. Khumalo avoids depicting subjects, barring silhouetted figures against a light in the work Umlindelo, referring to a funeral rite. They bring to mind Dickensian characters in the slums of Victorian London, who hover on the edges in darkness.
How can an artist depict poverty, loss and dispossession respectively, faithfully? Representation of others is so intensely policed now that artists tend to focus on themselves. This has engendered a form of artistic narcissism where the artist’s face, most prominently in the work of Mohau Modisakeng who will represent our country at the Venice Biennale, is the central motif.
Khumalo uses, exploits, the landscape genre as a figurative canvas to project the state of our nation, evoking a sense of devastation and bleakness. Nothing quite relays this quality like the colour black.
This idea and the use of the "darkened" landscape genre defined Gwen Van Embden’s recent exhibition, Mountain + Water at the AVA gallery too. Despite the title, the exhibition was dominated by these large black ink forms that obscured our view of an imagined landscape. She claimed it was a reflection of these chaotic times.
For Van Embden, the horizon is beyond our view. Khumalo offers it to us, but he draws our gaze up with those big rolling clouds, threatening a storm. Dark flocks of birds punctuate his skies, evoking migrant populations that leave when conditions are no longer habitable.
Whereas Van Embden provides little reprieve, Khumalo threads a little hope through his dark drawings in the form of electricity and telephone cables, implying connectivity. We’re all in it together. You can fly away but you can’t sever ties. It is this kind of unity that should turn us, his viewers, into active citizens, as we are all implicated in what happens to each other.
The Place Called Home, by Themba Khumalo, shows at the Red Room Gallery in Cape Town until the end of May. Corrigall is an art consultant. www.corrigall.org