Millennials are hell bent on recreating global culture in their own image. The Instagram Exhibition ‘#instabition’ is now a legitimate medium to exhibit art on Instagram, whether shot with a Canon or iPhone, this trend with the potential to compete with physical art museums. The South African #instabition have been pioneered by contemporaries of Phindile Thengeni, Mongezi Mcelu, Sizwe Mbiza and others.
Introducing KNeo Mokgopa, a multidisciplinary creative practitioner from Cape Town. KNeo’s work is commonly an expression of mental illness, identity politics and commentary on society. Their current #instabititon “M’SHIMAN(YANA)” is now showing on their instagram gallery @bloody_kneo.
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M’SHIMAN(YANA) is a neologism from the SePedi words ‘Moshimane’ (boy) and ‘Ngwanyana’ (girl). The exhibition is a meditation on South Africa millennials and the duality they live with: dualities in gender, cultural identity, migration and home, and other psycho-social paradigms.
Black South African millennials’ experience of Double Consciousness is a rich and robust narrative. Millennials live acutely antagonistic, paradoxical double lives between western and indigenous forms of social intercourse, diet, habits, language, psychic space and ethics; this dualism is compounded for gender-fluid millennials whose gendered identities are not fixed, oscillates between masculinity and femininity, safety and victimhood, depending on the liberty provided by the space.
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Sources of inspiration include:
Frantz Fanon ‘Black Skin White Mask’; Paul Gilroy ‘The Black Atlantic’; W.E.B. Du Bois ‘The Souls of Black Folk’; Solange Knowles ‘A Seat At The Table’; Maxhosa by Laduma; Zoe Modiga’s ‘Yellow’; Sampha ‘(No One Knows Me) Like The Piano’; Koleka Putuma ‘Collective Amnesia’; Donald Glover ‘Atlanta’.
Produced by KNeo Mokgopa
Photography by Sam Bears
Sponsored by Tarka
The exhibition can still be viewed on Instagram here: www.instagram.com/bloody_kneo/.