Please join us this Thursday, 13 February, for the opening of GIRLS TOO: TOO MUCH, NEVER ENOUGH, a group exhibition curated by Keely Shinners and assisted by Mihlali Jiya, at Lemkus Gallery, Fourth Floor, 28 St. George’s Mall, 18:00 – 20:00.

Featuring work by: Alka Dass, Cara Biederman, Charity Vilakazi, Dominique Cheminais, Gabriele Jacobs, Jet Snaith, Kerry Lee Chambers, Leah Mascher, Lebogang Mabusela, Miró van der Vloed, Nabeeha Mohamed, Nano Le Face, Neha Misra, Queezy Babaz, Sara Matthews, Sichumile Adam, Tyra Naidoo and Yolanda Mazwana.

The Raft of the Medusa

“My forthcoming exhibition uses Théodore Géricault’s   iconic painting, “The Raft of the Medusa,” as the subject or focus for a small series of allegorical paintings. Completed in 1819, Gericault’s painting depicts the survivors of The Medusa, a French naval frigate that was wrecked off the coast of West Africa en route to Senegal in 1816. Although it portrays the scene of the survivors adrift on a raft in the open ocean, it also carried a powerful political subtext about French society, hopelessly adrift in a turbulent political landscape after a decade of European wars.

My work aims to use this iconic painting to set the scene for today’s stages of contemporary conflict, be it social science, international politics or whatever the viewer may recognise in it. My agenda is to raise questions, provoke reactions and spark debate. There is no clear message that I wish to deliver, nor ideology that I wish to support. In a sense I wish to assume the role of observer, or the keeper of records.”

“Boemo Diale’s new body work borrows from and responds to the aesthetics and the overarching imagination of Setswana and other indigenous cosmologies. Using symbols which are common to these universes, Diale reflects on the idea of finding one's place in the world through a connection to both culture and the cosmos. 

The title of her show, Tswala Gate, directly translates to “Close The Gate”. It is both an instruction and a protective act, so that she is able to create a sense of safety and locate her place in the world.

The work also serves as a metaphor. It suggests a desire to look forward and inward, without fear, while also reflecting the relationship between Tswana cosmologies and Diale’s inner world of personal reflection. 

Two world systems coexist — the world within and the world outside —and align  with Uhuru Portia Phalafala’s ideas expressed  in Keorapetse Kgositsile & The Black Arts Movement, as “a comprehension of home and community cultures of Setswana as dynamics of modernity, not its antithesis.” 

Tswana cosmology is a geocentric view of the universe made up of the stars, the moon, and the sky; with Earth at the centre. That Earth is interpreted as somewhat flat, expressed in the one-dimensional planes of Diale’s compositions. Handed down orally, differing from person to person and tribe to tribe, Diale uses this tradition to speak to new ideas and build a lexicon of her own self-made identifications of the world around her.

Bridging these coterminal worlds, she sets her figures in vibrant interior settings with reimagined depths of fields and planes, Diale creates a ‘safe space’ in which her characters live to rest away from the world. Placed at the centre of her cosmos, the characters, which are versions of selves, mothers, aunts and sisters, each create their own realities with symbols and stories inspired by Tswana cosmological practices. 

Looking forward with the help of tools of divination, including the vessel and articulated borders she uses as devices, she temporarily closeslosing the gate between pastand future, borrowing from genetic memory to create new visual language within the protected confines.

*Keorapetse Kgositsile & The Black Arts Movement by Uhuru Portia Phalafala