The opening week included an important three-day colloquium devised by Felwine Sarr, with speakers such as Gayatri Spivak and Benedicte Savoy, as well as the African Art Book Fair with its own programme of talks. Transforming through fire conjures a pluriversality of mythic and ritual knowledges and practices, as well as technical and artistic capacities that, contrary to what is often told, emerged in the African continent long before they did in Europe.
Although obviously present, the latter were comparatively less prevalent. To be sure, materiality is no less capable of being inventively and rigorously conceptual, and its aesthetic appeal does not deprive it of its epistemic and ethico-political significance. Likewise, more performative, dematerialised and digital art forms offer no guarantee of epistemic or political relevance. And yet, it often seemed as if the metaphor of material forging had been taken all too literally. The most enticing works were mixed media, forging new discourses and meanings about the contemporary, enduring past legacies and archival futures from a combination of material and conceptual, personal and political means, to be experienced both bodily and affectively, as well as cognitively, by the viewer.
The South African artist Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape also known as Mo Laudi presented a powerful installation comprising the sonic composition Motho ke motho ka batho A Tribute to Mancoba , as well as the pictorial Rest-itution and the sculptural Rest-itude , both pertaining to his The Rest Paintings series fig 2.
The installation had an architectural dimension as the artist intervened in the entire space assigned to him, painting it white, and connecting the music notation represented in painting and sculpture to the one inscribed on the wall and in the linear geometry afforded by some stairs. The South African artist Mzwandile Buthelezi similarly intertwined visuality, sound and silence in his mixed-media installation, which comprised the drawing series The Texture of Silence — fig 3 and music from one of the Johannesburg-based interdisciplinary collectives to which he belongs, The Texture of Silence.
Like jazz improvisation, they revolve around repetition and change, conjuring a flexible structure, the continuous interplay between part and whole, individual and collective, elemental and cosmic, sound and silence.
