Art in conversation

The Lemkus Gallery in the heart of the Cape Town business district welcomed a throng of people as University of Cape Town (UCT) master’s in art history student Voni Baloyi launched an exhibition she has curated, titled At Their Feet on Friday, 13 June.

The exhibition title is inspired by Nadia Davids’ seminal play At Her Feet, which is a one-woman play in one act that reflects upon the lives of six Muslim women coming to terms with their identity and religion in relation to the aftermath of 9/11. For Baloyi, At Their Feet breaks down the silos of artistic production by pairing artists and asking them to instil practices of care by being in service to their fellow colleague. Each artist has produced an artwork that grapples with themes personal to their identity, worldview, lived experience, or what they find themselves contending with at this moment in their practice.

“It’s a show two years in the making,” Baloyi said. “I have paired artists to engage with one another’s work, and they respond to one another, and what comes out are moments of care and mothering. When I speak of mothering, I look beyond the biological manifestation of mothering and see it as care that is inhabited by any person and creating conditions of love in a tough world and in moments of crisis.”

The exhibition is also supported by Creative Knowledge Resource, “[an] open access platform for collaboration, art writing and creative pedagogy on social engagement art in Africa and its diaspora”. Baloyi said, “Seeing the meshing of practices across the board has been beautiful. It’s one thing conceptualising a show; it’s another doing the work. I’ve had to walk the talk. I always try, when working with artists, to meet them where they are. I am an advocate of pleasure and manifestation, particularly for black women, and if I can’t facilitate that, my curatorial practice falls flat.”

Zenaéca Singh – visual artist, graduate of the Michaelis School of Fine Art

Singh, who has recently completed her master’s in fine art, explores the complex history of the sugar economy in South Africa and its entanglement with migration, colonialism, labour exploitation, and the dynamics of the domestic sphere. “The reason I use sugar is because of my heritage and lineage of indentured labourers in KwaZulu-Natal. It’s a very colonial perspective, and what I wanted to do is to offer a glimpse and intimacy of this lived experience,” she said.

Her current works draw primarily on family and archival photographs, transforming them into alluring paintings and assemblages made from molasses, sugar and sugar paste in different states of crystallisation. Singh uses domestic references and imagery to trace connections between the sugar economy and its impacts on domestic culture and conventions for South African Indians.

“I’ve been practicing since 2022, and it’s been an insightful experience working with sugar and how people are responding to it as it is a very interesting and sticky subject matter. The purpose of my art is to take it much broader and to create relational understanding and that is what my community has done for me. We’ve been having interesting discourse and a lot more meaningful conversations, which I think is what art is meant to do. Key to my practice is representation,” added Singh.

Rebaone Finger – visual artist, graduate of the Michaelis School of Fine Art

Finger, a multimedia sculpture artist, is academically interested in the politics of being: silent rage, rest, freedom and luxury, black consumerism, social media, food politics, naming cultures, blackness and black feminisms. As a resemblance of living in-between worlds of access and lack [thereof], Finger’s practice finds its commentary in adopting South African use of food as a naming culture.

“My art is an extension of my graduation show, which was centred around ‘cheese girl’. Growing up, I was associated with the term ‘cheese girl’ and it isolated me, but I began to enquire more about what the term is,” Finger said. “Reading a Karabo Ledwaba article about ‘cheese girl’ being about who is looking in, in other words, the art of perception, is what inspired my interest in the term.”

The term has grown to include and communicate far more expansive layers and levels of social class disparities between the privileged and the underprivileged. “Seeing my work on display is humbling because I just graduated and this is my first group show. My practice is centred around re-identifying what luxury is and what occupying that space as a black body looks like, so I found that gap and I entered. I make sure that my art speaks to what is happening right now. ‘Cheese girl’ is also drawn from a lot of social media tropes and my responsibility is doing it in an authentic way. I pay homage to my community. I’ve kept in touch with mine and ensured that I take them along on the journey.”