Moshekwa Langa

November 22, 2003 - February 25, 2004

Moshekwa Langa was born in Bakenburg, South Africa in 1975, more than a decade before the official end of apartheid in 1989. As a black South African, he not only witnessed but also experienced first hand the injustices of racial segregation and the effects of the vast government program known as “grand apartheid.” Devised and implemented in 1958 to create a white republic and new black tribal homelands, grand apartheid involved the reversal of black migration into cities and forced resettlement of more than 3.5 million people in an extensively reconfigured geography. Violent protest, dissolution of families, and the formation of enormous, under-served shantytowns in the black homelands are just a few examples of the political and social upheavals caused by this system of institutionalized racism.

Not surprisingly, the traumas associated with racism, dislocation, displacement, and alienation are pervasive themes in Langa’s autobiographical work, though he is careful to avoid the documentary impulse and political polemic. The artist works instead with poignant images filtered through memory and tinged with sentiment and nostalgia. He explained this preference in a 2001 interview: “When I started to show my work, I felt forced to talk about the experience of ‘otherness’ rather than the poetic gesture, which is really what interests me.”

The present ensemble, entitled Interior Monologue, comprises several of Langa’s collages, paintings, videos, and installation pieces made since his move from Johannesburg to Amsterdam. Beautiful, layered abstractions that recall the African landscape and reveal millennia of geological strata serve as both the literal and conceptual ground for the artist’s other investigations. Enormous collages contain tattered fragments of South African maps that have been reorganized in unfamiliar, confusing, and disquieting ways. Melancholy references to travel—leave-taking in particular—such as abandoned suitcases, rickety buses, and airplanes abound, speaking to the artist’s expatriation from the land of his birth. Diaristic text paintings scattered throughout the exhibition record Langa’s various preoccupations. These are both deeply personal and exemplary of a contemporary consciousness shaped by trans-national nomadism and the forces of globalization.

Moshekwa Langa graduated from the Rijksakademie voor Beeldende Kunst, Amsterdam in 1998. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions at such venues as the 2003 Biennale di Venezia, Venice; Kwangju Biennial, Korea (2000); Renaissance Society, Chicago (1999); Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (1999); and the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1998). Moshekwa Langa, his first monograph, was published by the Renaissance Society in 2002.

Exhibition Sponsor: Cinergy Foundation

2003-2004 Season Presenting Sponsor: Dr. Stanley & Mickey Kaplan