04.03.23
Duo Exhibition at
Kalashnikovv Gallery,
Johannesburg

Exhibition Statement

“Can wounds testify to more than we are willing to say? ”

When we think of dis(ease) what might come to mind are headaches, coughs, fevers, hospitals and isolation – the opposite of health. Theresa–Anne Mackintosh and Yolanda Mazwana take us beyond binary understandings of illness and health by reflecting on a body’s relationships to illness, others and the self. Through their own unique visual languages, they offer expert use of colour and compelling figurative work as affective cues for experiences that must be felt rather than understood.

Mackintosh develops her work from a position of quiet and intense subjectivity while remaining sensitive to the broader human condition. In the process, she has created a distinct visual lexicon, giving shape to various personal situations, gestures and symbols in her paintings, drawings and sculptural works. In her solo exhibition, I Can Hear Lull (2019), Mackintosh showcased the potential of tenderness/fragility to carry dark/difficult concepts, her figures characteristically operating in a terrain of in-betweens. They are interrupted identities that live within a paused state of the unspoken. Fusing with each other and then retreat into an unnamable remoteness. Mackintosh’s figures seem eerily complicit in each other’s unspoken plight. Through illness, a deeper understanding that suffering and healing are deeply connected comes about.

Mazwana’s paintings transpire from the perspective of a black female body. Looking into the relationship between the private and public as she observes the physical being (what is obvious and what is not so obvious). Conversations on intimacy and vulnerability and the stories of coercion in-between. The (in)visible traumas, uncomfortable truths, compromises and sacrifices, bodily pains, colds and shivers. Looking into all these aspects and the invasion of the female body throughout the different stages and experiences of growing up, including sex and childbearing years. Following on the visceral painterly figuration, gestures and symbolism of her previous solo exhibitions – Read the Room (2022) and After Midnight (2021) – the artist delves deeper into the possibilities of the medium to carry and express meaning. Delicately ruminating on how the mind, with things like hypochondria, and agoraphobia, can affect the body, and vice versa through medications and being misdiagnosed. Mazwana is as interested in that which is (mis)treated as that which is forgotten and how the act of hiding can serve as a form of protection.

In this exhibition we see how healing can be traced within the different forms and embodiments of wounds. Both artists approach uncomfortable concepts such as illness and trauma with a sensitivity and dexterity that reminds us of how both wounds and healing are part of the entangled messiness of being human. We are, as in sickness, as in health: the union and discord of mind and body.