HOW LATITUDES BECOME FORMS : Moshekwa Langa

Archives, 2002
Moshekwa Langa
Photo courtesy Galerie Tanya Rumpff, Haarlem, The Netherlands

Moshekwa Langa

Moshekwa Langa b.1975 (South Africa)
lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands

launch interview with Moshekwa Langa

An artist not afraid to draw from a life lived in-between places--physical, mental, and otherwise-- Moshekwa Langa creates drawings, photographs, videos, and installations that are poetic, personal, and deeply engaged with the larger world of art, politics, and popular culture. He often uses materials at his immediate disposal, including plastic bags, colorful yarns, masking tape, cement bags, and paint. In the same way that he layers diverse materials, he piles up meanings and references that are often cryptic and ambivalent yet resonant. The viewer is left to decode his artworks, which intrigue yet deny easy translation or classification.

Langa maps a complex diasporic identity that has taken him from rural South Africa through Johannesburg to his current sojourn in Northern Europe. He sometimes refers to himself as "an inside-outsider," never truly fitting in anywhere and caught between his self-imposed exile and nostalgia for where he's been. His color-drenched drawings often include enigmatic riddles related to this in-between life: "no body"; "imagine that you are here"; "uncertainty as your guide." Each phrase is a reminder that meaning is slippery and we are all on the verge of un-belonging as the world changes around us more quickly that we can acclimatize to it. However fragmented and unstable, Langa's universe also engages with the realities of daily life, both in his choice of earthbound materials and in his subject matter. His video installation Home Movies: Where Do We Begin (2001) includes a quietly poignant scene showing only the feet of people as they board a public bus in his hometown of Bakenberg. We catch glimpses of a missing sock, a bit of shawl almost dragging on the ground, a bulging shopping bag, a walking stick, and the smart trouser legs of various passengers. Like much of Langa's work, this scene invites the viewer to spin a narrative of his or her own from the clues the artist provides, each leading to many possible destinations.

Langa has had solo exhibitions at the Centre d'art contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland (1999); The Renaissance Society, Chicago, Illinois (1999); and the Rembrandt van Rijn Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa (1995). He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including The Short Century: Movements in Africa, 1945-1994 at Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, Germany (2001); the 2000 Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; the XXIV Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (1998); and the 1997 Johannesburg Biennial. In 2001 he was awarded the FNB Vita Art Prize in South Africa.

--Olukemi Ilesanmi

Untitled
Moshekwa Langa

1996
series of drawings, mixed media on paper and plastic
36-1/2 x 28-1/2 in.
92.7 x 72.4 cm
Collection Susan and Lewis Manilow, Chicago, Illinois

In both his Archives and Untitled series of drawings from 1996 to 2002, Langa maps a complex diasporic identity that has taken him from rural South Africa through Johannesburg to his current sojourn in Northern Europe. He sometimes refers to himself as "an inside-outsider," never truly fitting in anywhere and caught between his self-imposed exile and nostalgia for where he's been. His color-drenched drawings often include enigmatic riddles related to this in-between life: "no body"; "imagine that you are here"; "uncertainty as your guide." Each phrase is a reminder that meaning is slippery and we are all on the verge of un-belonging as the world changes around us more quickly that we can acclimate. However fragmented and unstable, Langa's universe also engages with the realities of daily life, both in his choice of earthbound materials and in his subject matter.

Untitled from Names and Places III
Moshekwa Langa

2001
mixed media on paper
55 x 39 in.
139.7 x 99.1 cm
Courtesy Galerie Tanya Rumpff, Haarlem, The Netherlands

Archives
Moshekwa Langa

2002
series of drawings, mixed media on paper
55 x 39 in.
139.7 x 99.1 cm
Courtesy Galerie Tanya Rumpff, Haarlem, The Netherlands

In both his Archives and Untitled series of drawings from 1996 to 2002, Langa maps a complex diasporic identity that has taken him from rural South Africa through Johannesburg to his current sojourn in Northern Europe. He sometimes refers to himself as "an inside-outsider," never truly fitting in anywhere and caught between his self-imposed exile and nostalgia for where he's been. His color-drenched drawings often include enigmatic riddles related to this in-between life: "no body"; "imagine that you are here"; "uncertainty as your guide." Each phrase is a reminder that meaning is slippery and we are all on the verge of un-belonging as the world changes around us more quickly that we can acclimate. However fragmented and unstable, Langa's universe also engages with the realities of daily life, both in his choice of earthbound materials and in his subject matter.

Content, Context, and Cultural Commitment: Curating the Performing Arts
Philip Bither, Baraka Sele

BS: Let me give you a recent example. I was working on a collaborative project with another institution. I wish I could say this was twenty years ago, but it was only last year. This major institution developed a budget in which the African artists were getting paid less than the American artists. I called the institution and said, "I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt, but what's happening here?" They replied, "Well, these artists aren't used to making this kind of money. If they receive the same amount of money as the American dancers, won't that have a negative impact on their community because they'll be taking back home all this money that will create an imbalance?" I couldn't believe it. I said, "If we are not paying all the artists the same amount, I'm out of the project." I believe in cultural and international equity. Anything else is exploitation.

PB: Going back to how we can be "nodes of information," we talk at the Walker about "sculpting a season." Part of the curatorial role is to determine what your community is ready for, to shape your programming in a way that builds a base of knowledge, to create--as much as possible within the uncontrollable aspects of touring and availability--a logical sequence for the season that can be almost like a curriculum, that can build upon what you've done in the past and be intelligible for the audience. In addition, at the Walker we have the rather rare opportunity to establish links between the disciplines, to place artists' work in an artistic continuum that stretches far beyond the specific performance form and into visual arts, literature, film and video, new media.

BS: I have to go back to the Houston International Festival, which taught me so much. One of the things we were trying to do was to give our audiences in Houston a more in-depth framework for looking at culture. It wasn't meaningful to just bring artists to perform on a stage. That's what I try to do wherever I go, which is why I present both contemporary and traditional art forms. I'm, once again, using the term traditional in the very generalized, superficial way that we use it.

PB: You feel that the traditional provides a base for people to understand the contemporary?

BS: Absolutely. I want people to know that the performing arts of Africa are not just one thing. It's not just people beating on drums. It's so much more rich and complex. When I brought six different dance companies from Taiwan in one season, I wanted people to see the many variations of form and style. I wanted to convey the range and depth of work.

PB: All the different threads of artistic directions. Do you also concentrate on a certain part of the world in a given season?

BS: I have been doing that. I'm doing less of that now. I'm actually focusing more on form and discipline and bringing folks together from different parts of the world who are connected to a form. For instance, I am producing an international festival on hip-hop culture for November 2002. We started off by having a large meeting. I just put out the word via e-mail, whatever networks I could find, asking young people in our community to come and talk about their ideas of what this conference should be. One of the first issues that came up was globalization.

PB: In what respect?

BS: They feel like we're talking about globalization as a negative thing, especially from an economic point of view--how the multinational corporations are taking over the world, how McDonald's is in every country, every nook and cranny of every continent.

PB: And cultural specificity is being lost.

BS: Cultural specificity is being lost, but they have a different take on this phenomenon. This is the first time they have had their own cultural phenomenon, hip hop, which is being exported all over the world, and they can point to it and say, "We created that. It started in our community. Now the world has caught on to it and wants it." It has empowered them. They have their own record producers. They have their own recording studios. They are making money. Young people are developing into entrepreneurs and creating multinational corporations that export American pop culture. Now we are saying that this is a bad thing.

Interactions/Intersections: Cultural Globalism and Educational Practice
Christi Atkinson, Susan Rotilie, Sarah Schultz, Kiyoko Motoyama Sims, Meredith Walters

on Uttar-Priyadashi.[2] This work could be perceived as traditional East Indian theater-dance from the Westerner's point of view, but from the East Indian's point of view it's a very contemporary interpretation of the traditional forms. It made me rethink how I might design programs with different resident artists and art forms that we bring in from around the world. When the Walker presented Uttar-Priyadashi, our solution was to invite a scholar of Indian dance and theater, Dr. Sunil Kothari, who was traveling with the company, to speak to students in theater and dance classes at Macalester College and also to have him give a talk before the show. It helped to frame the performance within a more nuanced context than simply traditional or nontraditional. It conveyed that these artists are carrying forward--and adding complexity to--longheld traditions, but using a contemporary vocabulary.

MW: Making those many vocabularies available is so important, and your solution is a perfect illustration of it. Westerners, Americans, anyone removed from that culture, really, have limited vocabularies for that form of dance. As you said, traditional and nontraditional are terms that don't illuminate anything and are in fact misleading. Audiences unfamiliar with these complex histories are forced to make analogies to what they do know--or think they know--about a foreign culture, which is usually a mix of news reports, a few facts from world history class, or artifacts seen in museums. In a contemporary arts context we had the opportunity to distinguish between flat representations of a culture and the actual artistic process of contemporary dancers from Manipur.

SS: I valued hearing about the various issues and challenges the committee members faced in their own communities surrounding the presentation of contemporary work. Walter Chakela, for example, is dealing with a particular history of revolution and apartheid in South Africa. He was struggling to convince his audience, consisting of primarily black South Africans, that their literature and theater are as good and as valuable as the works of Shakespeare and Chekov. Because European drama was all they ever read or learned about in school, Shakespeare is perceived as literature with a capital L, and they needed to be convinced that their stories, about revolution and apartheid, were equally "Literature." Though the details vary from locale to locale, in a strange way it was reassuring to discover that everyone around the table was wrestling with the challenge of overcoming audiences' preconceptions and apprehensions about contemporary art.

Christi Atkinson: One thing this initiative has reinforced for me is the power of certain words, such as global and globalism, and how those words can mean dramatically different things to different people. For example, one of our advisors felt that globalism was just a buzzword for the new American imperialism. And yet, no matter how strongly we all felt that these words were problematic, there were no agreed-upon, adequate alternatives to these terms. When our vocabulary itself is shifting, the intended discussions can't even be realized.

KMS: There is a connection between a person's perception of a word--such as globalism, community, local--and the cultural background and history that he or she grew up in. I'm working in an American institution, creating programs for an American audience, yet this process has made it clear that my ideas of internationalism or globalism stem from being Japanese and growing up in Japan. I have a double perception in a way.

I am sensitive to how Asian culture is often wrapped up into one big category, which hides all the unique qualities and differences within Asian cultures and art. Asia includes China, Japan, and Korea as well as the expanse of Southeast Asia, and we all have very distinct cultural and artistic traditions and histories, although we have a lot of things in common too. From the Westerner's point of view, the commonalties are often emphasized more than the differences. I am much more aware of the need to accentuate differences within Asian cultures, rather than to simplify them in one cultural category.

SS: Do you think there is a tendency in America to lump everyone from one country or continent together?

2 Uttar-Priyadarshi (The Final Beatitude) is a music-theater-dance work conceived and directed by Ratan Thyiam, a leading East Indian director, and uses stylized movement and vocal techniques that reference traditional performing and martial arts of Manipur. Uttar-Priyadarshi was performed by the Chorus Repertory Theatre of Manipur, India, which was established by Thyiam. It was copresented by the Walker Art Center and the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts at the Ordway Center, St. Paul, Minnesota, on October 2, 2000.

Musings on Globalism and Institutional Change
Vishakha N. Desai, Kathy Halbreich

ON JANUARY 26, 2002, Kathy Halbreich, director of the Walker Art Center, and Vishakha N. Desai, senior vice president and director of the Museum at the Asia Society, New York, sat down to discuss the pitfalls and the grace notes of addressing globalism in one's institutional and curatorial practices. Following is an edited version of that conversation.

Kathy Halbreich: Some people think of the Asia Society as a culturally specific institution that focuses exclusively on traditional art. Since joining the Asia Society in 1990, you've been clear that it is, quite literally, a multicultural institution that highlights contemporary as well as traditional practice across the disciplines. Can you talk about some of the challenges of being involved in an institution that represents half of the world?

Vishakha N. Desai: It is interesting that even though the purview of the Asia Society covers more than half of the world, we call it "culturally specific" whereas institutions that typically cover Euro-American cultures are often seen as being "universal" or encyclopedic. Such perceptions are at the heart of how Asian art is received in this country.

One could argue that throughout the last century the ways in which the histories of Asian art have been told in the United States, and in the West in general, have tended to differentiate those stories from the present and from one another. When I began to ask why the study of Asian art so often excludes the twentieth century, I became increasingly aware of my own hybridity, which is also a reflection of the hybrid history of modern Asia. Clearly the study of this history, embedded in the history of colonialism, undermines the "purity" question that is equated with traditional Asian art.

KH: What is the "purity" question?

VND: Once you acknowledge colonial history, even for those countries that were not colonized in the twentieth century, the history of twentieth-century Asian art cannot be discussed without considering the intervention, influence, and hegemony of the West. It cannot be done. One of the things we've learned from the debate going on in cultural studies is that when you look at other cultures, if you keep them "pure" or "authentic," you also keep them ahistorical, nonchanging, static. But cultures can no longer be examined in isolation. The minute I ask myself, "Who am I? What composes my identity?" I realize that the privileging of Asian cultures as pure and as "other" is an ideological position that is not acceptable.

KH: I'd like to examine how art historians have tended to differentiate one culture from another, acknowledging neither the hybridity nor the perils of nationalism. But is it possible that one of the positive outcomes of glob-alism today is this sense of differentiation between and among ourselves, between and among our cultures, between and among continents, countries, and generations?

Moshekwa Langa

. . . we’re talking about globalization as a negative thing, especially from an economic point of view--how the multinational corporations are taking over the world, how McDonald’s is in every country . . .

Audiences unfamiliar with these complex histories are forced to make analogies to what they do know--or think they know--about a foreign culture, which is usually a mix of news reports, a few facts from world history class, or artifacts seen in museums.

Once you acknowledge colonial history, even for those countries that were not colonized in the twentieth century, the history of twentieth-century Asian art cannot be discussed without considering the intervention, influence, and hegemony of the West.