Over the past two decades, Kemang Wa Lehulere has drawn on everyday objects and visual references to engage with a range of critical themes in performances and installation art. These include racial oppression, violence, identity, censorship, educational discrimination and, more generally, politics and systems of control and representation, particularly in South Africa. With a background in fine arts, theatre, poetry and filmmaking, he leans on a transmedial approach to assert his style and political convictions in an expressive, playful narrative fashion.
I Bleach My Words for Your Comfort is an allegorical library. It houses more than seven hundred clay paving bricks in lieu of books, painted chalkboard-black and arranged in rows on green shelves. As in any official library, the brick books are organised, jacketed and aligned with their spines facing outward. Interspersed among them are hand casts in bronze and resin that signify letters of the sign-language alphabet. The ensemble points to bureaucracies of censorship and the cycle of violence they have wrought on knowledge production.
Wa Lehulere aims to address the metanarrative of history – its tendency toward gaps, selective amnesia, redaction, forgetfulness and depoliticisation – rather than attempting to correct it. His is an important critical voice in post-apartheid South Africa, advocating for a new historical consciousness in contemporary art.
—Athi Mongezeleli Joja
