Women rejuvenating SA's contemporary art scene

It’s noticeable that women artists and female-centric creativity is setting an intriguing direction for art in SA. The contemporary scene is often a bellwether for wider sociopolitical trends around the world, but a difference in SA is the leading role women artists are taking in setting intellectual and aesthetic agendas.

Among these agendas are revisions of colonial and African histories, a repositioning of domesticity as a powerful statement of artistic intent, and a rewriting of black women’s traumatic histories as a new type of mystical and spiritual narrative.

Among many other examples of work by women artists locally, notably the talents of the likes of Michaela Younge and Bonolo Kavula who are changing the possibilities of working with textiles a s a medium, four recent exhibitions of work stand out as challenging existing contemporary art narratives and reworking their concepts and mediums from a uniquely female perspective.

Teresa Kutalo Firmino’s recent exhibition at Everard Read in Johannesburg specifically addresses the trauma suffered by many black women in the fractured societies engendered by apartheid and its border wars. Firmino has developed a unique visual vocabulary, comprising mostly paint and collage, to elaborate a space where fantasy and spirituality redraw her traumatised family history. The recent exhibition of the first iteration of The Owners of the Earth, a multi-series project, was designed to explore exactly this space between trauma and fantasy. Firmino uses mysticism and a peculiarly African spirituality to give shape to this intersection of trauma and fantasy, considered as a social or collective phenomenon.

Artist Usha Seejarim is a well-established figure on the local scene, and is known specifically for her innovative use of domestic household objects and materials as the source for her artworks. Her implication is clear — the plates from steam irons, clothes horses and clothes pegs in her work, usually taking sculptural form — all are repurposed to take these stereotypically female domestic objects and lionise them, turning their banal and repressive gendered nature into set of public and iconic art objects. Her public sculptures around Johannesburg are well known, in particular the angel’s wings made of steam iron plates that stand in the Oxford Parks art district. But her recent collaborative installation tops them all in terms of its huge scale and ironic presentation.

Seejarim has just collaborated with an African collective comprising Sao and the 1:54 Art Fair, and called Project Aikido, to build an immense 14m-high sculpture of a deconstructed clothes peg, titled “the Resurrection of the Clothes Peg”. The sculpture was built in Nigeria and shipped to the Nevada desert in the US last month as one of the giant centrepieces for the famous Burning Man festival.

Two other recent shows have taken a similar trajectory — without explicit reference to each other — in rewriting the history of African women in pre-colonial and early colonial societies.

Cape Town-based artist Chantal Coetzee has produced a powerful new body of work, still on show at 3rd Eye Gallery in Cape Town, whose subjects are literally African Queens, a collection of portraits of meticulously researched historical subjects, all of whom were Queens of their people in various parts of Africa in past centuries ranging from the 17th to the 19th, comprising a fascinating social and political history consistently suppressed by subsequent generations of patriarchy and colonialism.

The approach of taking forgotten figures from history and restoring them to a properly allegorical and powerful contemporary setting, as if in tribute, is not unique to Coetzee — with Nandipha Mntambo for example, memorably having done so recently in her exhibition “Agoodje” at Everard Read, which began in Johannesburg earlier this year and has been installed in Cape Town. Mntambo’s magisterial collection takes the form of an elegant celebration of the Agoodjie warriors of Dahomey, part of modern-day Benin.

In the 17th and 18th centuries Dahomey was a rich and powerful nation, with an elite personal guard for their kings comprised entirely of four thousand highly trained female warriors. These African Amazons last fought in a final set of anti-colonial battles against the French in 1894.  The centrepieces of Mntambo’s body of work are two imposing sculpted bronzes almost 3m high, in which Mntambo herself is the model, taking on the dress and character of the Agoodje soldiers.

Taken together, these exciting recent exhibitions point to a leading role for women contemporary artists in establishing a new set of visual and conceptual templates for a new era. This set of representations and ideas provide a narrative that sets aside the ongoing predominance of the male gaze and masculine preoccupations  — all while intersecting with timely issues of race and history too.