Mohau Modisakeng: Beyond the Liminal Space
Mohau Modisakeng: Beyond the Liminal Space
July 12 - Sept 23 2017
‘The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome,
to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering’.
Mohau Modisakeng
Mohau Modisakeng: Beyond the Liminal Space, was part of the first SOAS Africa Conference ‘Imagining Africa’s Future: Language, Culture, Governance, Development’, the closing event of a series of activities that have celebrated the SOAS Centenary.
Mohau Modisakeng uses the corporality and fragility of his own body to poetically portray collective memories that respond to the history of the black subject within the context of South Africa. Mohau’s photographic work is layered, complex, and rich in symbolic references to mechanisms of violence, stressing on notions of inequality, capital, wealth, labor, race and ritual. His powerful images envisage liminal spaces of latent violence wherein black bodies have inhabited since the Apartheid era. On a broader spectrum, Mohau’s overall concerns, but most particularly the issue of violence and the role it played and continues to play in colonial as well as post-colonial African societies, apply to the rest of the continent.
The works selected for display at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS are part of Modisakeng’s acclaimed series Metamorphosis
and Frame. They are large photographs in black and white, ambiguously suggestive of sacred rituals, spaces for re-invention and for reaching beyond the liminality of the in-between. The artist’s work stands as a stimulus to create awareness of the past and to open up a new era for reflection and change. Vastly in line with the spirit of the first SOAS Africa Conference, Mohau Modisakeng, through his work seeks ‘the representation of a more assertive black subject, one that is unapologetically present in the frame’.
