Art Review: Meleko Mokgosi, the Current, Stowe
Department of Art alumnus Meleko Mokgosi’s large-scale, figurative, and often text-based works engage history painting and cinematic tropes to uncover notions of colonialism, democracy, and liberation across African history.
"Objects of Desire 6" by Meleko Mokgosi. "Walking inside "Scripto-visual," Meleko Mokgosi's spectacular exhibit of paintings and prints at the Current gallery in Stowe, the viewer encounters an 8-foot-tall enlargement of a fist-shaking political poem by Gladys Thomas. "You that remade us / your mould will break / and tomorrow you are going to fall!" Mokgosi borrows the title of his work from Karl Marx: "The Social Revolution of Our Time Cannot Take Its Poetry From the Past but Only From the Poetry of the Future."
In the margins and between the lines, Mokgosi — Botswana-born, now based in Brooklyn — has handwritten commentary that provides crucial context. The poem condemns the Group Areas Act of 1950, by which South Africa's apartheid government removed non-white people from their homes and relocated them to barren areas.
This massive piece of stark text forces Western viewers to shift their default frameworks and "figure out how to empathize and look at something from a position that is not theirs," as the artist told the New York Times in 2019. That is, to stop interpreting the revolutionary struggle evoked by the poem through the lens of white Europeans from a couple of centuries ago, and instead see it through the lens of South Africans living under apartheid several decades ago.
To drive this point home visually, a small warning sign, emblazoned with the face of a German shepherd, hangs like a surveillance camera in the upper righthand corner of the poem. "ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK," it reads.
Mokgosi, an associate professor at Yale University, engages with notions of colonialism, democracy and liberation across African history. In doing so, he draws deeply on his study of critical theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis and pop culture. His work confronts the complex politics of representation, insisting that dominant Eurocentric narratives be "supplemented," as the gallery guide delicately puts it." — Benjamin Aleshire, Aug. 4, 2021
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Seven Days website.
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