Artist Asemare Ntronti. (Jonathan Cope)
IOpening passage by Canadian black writer Dionne Brand Map to the door of no return (2002), she refers to a shared sense of disappointment between her grandfather and herself.
It secures their exact origins in Africa, the peoples from whom they descend, and their place in the Old World, and their historical wounds of violent ontological, natal, and metaphysical origin. It's about her insatiable desire for a name to stitch together. displacement.
For Brand, this radical discrimination marks “a rupture in history, a rapture in the quality of existence,” which she calls “the end of traceable beginnings.”
I start with brand because I can't think of a better starting point when looking back at Cape Town-born artist Asemare Ntronti's current body of work.
Even more interesting is her interest in the tension between the Old World and the New, the politics, the stakes of this unconscious movement from one world to another.
Importantly for brands, the “old world” is gone. It is not going back and has become part of our problem, our modern dilemma. It is because of the asymmetric (non-)relationship between these two epistemological and metaphysical positions (old and new) that a return to the old world is unfeasible (we despite having sentimentally and spiritually invested in it).
In Ntlonti, we encounter an artist grappling with this question. Confronting the misplacement of one's place in the New World, one rejects the easy, uncritical, and reductive romanticization of the Old World.
Her quest to restore or mend a broken patrilineal relationship, she recalls, resulted in a deep sense of betrayal. It was a rude awakening to the pitfalls and (impossible) possibilities of black intramural space (as an emotional and spiritual space), a collective feeding that resulted in a sense of betrayal as solemn as it was debilitating. of).
We use this, through brands, to cause a “rift in the world”, a kind of ontological displacement that marks a position that is always already violated, if not precarious, in all those worlds. You might think of it as something.
in the work of Izon Zovilla With the Blank Project in Cape Town, Ntronti expands his interest in this “rift”, this fissure and fissure. It appears as cracks and fissures on the surface of the canvas, opening up the surface of the painting while pending definitive interpretation.
Her description of her method as “ukuglomba'' leads us to think of her practice as archaeological research. Ukugurumba, or “Ukugurumba”, roughly means “to dig” but also means “to dig out” or “to excavate.”
Ntlonti's method involves peeling off the top layer or scab of paint by hand, targeting lumps and soft spots, using something like a sharp nail or using her fingers to drag and tear the skin of the piece. Expose the dry brown parts of the cardboard that stick out.
She sprays water on the cardboard to darken it and scratch it.[o/u]mba' wet.
It reveals layers of paint from her go-to palette of “shy colors.” Patches of purple, earthy brown, pink, dull white, and muted turquoise.
Ntlonti acknowledges that the color of the cardboard (brown) evokes the land (landscape) and soil, thus mobilizing “ukugr.''[u/o]MBA” is used as a metaphor for her abstract concept.
However, due to its unavoidable association with the skin, more properly the body, and its relationship with aesthetics (as David Lloyd puts it in Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics (2018), the aesthetic domain is always (i.e., constitutively racial), appalling.
If the archaeological act, in its ethnic pretense, seeks to discover what the earth's strata hide, that is, to excavate them, what does skin digging do? (or try to clarify)?
(When it comes to bodies and land, I still have to take seriously the scene in Remohan Jeremiah Mose's film This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection (2019), in which Mantoa, played by the late Mary Twala, buries his head in a mountain. A clod of dirt when you are overwhelmed with sadness. )
What is at stake here is what we might call trauma, an obsession with lost objects that eludes us from its status.
“Memory is very important to me,” Ntronti once told me.
Psychoanalyst Bruce Fink says, “Trauma means attachment and blockage.'' For Fink, “fixation always contains something unsymbolized,” that is, something that cannot be placed under the weight of language and expressed symbolically.
This elusive something not only escapes us, it requires us to repress it and, as Bloke Modisan puts it in The Blame of History (1963), “once It is necessary to be “pushed down and banked” until a violent eruption…is released.[s] A cauldron of repressed hurt.”
This “storage'' of repressed spiritual matter is therefore a Lacanian “reality'' and must not be confused with (social) reality. The latter is thought and spoken of through language, but the former, following Fink, is 'reality'. “It does not exist, because it precedes language” (emphasis in the original) and strictly refers to the formation of man as a subject (in the strict sense), and “that which has not yet been symbolized, the symbol “symbolization'' is best understood as something that continues to be, or is resisting.
In conclusion, the “contradiction” of black artists makes the most sense when considering racial slavery (or its afterlife) and colonial conquest towards abstraction. In Discrepant Abstraction (2006), critic and art historian Kobena Mercer writes, He observes the various ways in which abstract art inverts the traumatic historical experience of its time. ”.
We can look to a state of being that cannot be easily translated, which the artist calls “isinkara.” This condition can be thought of as a deep feeling of sadness, or an almost permanent sadness that grips and overwhelms the body and mind.
It is Isinkara's vibrational and acoustic properties that explain the tearing of land and flesh that Brand calls the “geographical rupture” in the text above, which characterizes Nutronti's visuals. . vocabulary. Isinkara signifies the afterlife of a catastrophe, its progressiveness and permanence, the effects of which extend into our present.
Izon Zovilla will be on display at Blank Project in Cape Town until March 28th.