Moshekwa Langa Untitled

cm 95 x 75

Installation, painting, collage and performance are the languages used by Moshekwa Langa in his figurative research. The idea of the map, understood as a network of connections between places, events and people, is often the basis of his works, a mean to interpret the complex South African socio-political reality, deeply scarred by apartheid. Langa’s maps, each time, have taken the shape of networks that fit the dimensions of the display environment, made of wires, ropes and found objects, or patterns of relationships between abstract shapes or people. His painting is instead characterized by a deliberately naive expressive style, derived from African folk art, American “bad painting” and the creations of Jean-Michel Basquiat. The three works named "Untitled" belong to a series of thirteen “maps” of some regions of South Africa made in the year in which the artist moved to Holland, where he still lives and works. The maps, made with adhesive tape fixed to black rubbish bags, are of the Pretoria region and Dennilton, a town belonging to the former Bantustans of KwaNdebele, linked to the artist and reabsorbed into South Africa with the first democratic elections in 1994. The surfaces of the maps are altered by the artist with writings, erasures, drawings and collage work. Through these signs the artist wants to suggest, in contrast to the abstract coldness of the map, the existence of a social and human space, partly autobiographical, torn and wounded by decades of racial discrimination. The use of many different poor materials reveals the intention of seeking a personal, and at the same time, universal language, to neutralize the extreme social and political fragmentation, but also the linguistic fragmentation of the artist’s birthplace.

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H. Walker, E. Janus (eds.), Moshekwa Langa, exhibition catalogue (Geneva, Centre d’Art Contemporain; Chicago, The Renaissance Society), Chicago 2002. P. Colombo (ed.), Moshekwa Langa, exhibition catalogue (Rome, MAXXI-Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo), Milan 2005.

Foto Roberto Galasso

Donation by Lewis Manilow

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