“Art doesn’t have to solve problems, it only has to formulate them correctly”, said Anton Chekhov. Kemang Wa Lehulere’s solo exhibition ‘Bring Back Lost Love’ attempted to formulate the issue of loss and recovery – of land, dignity and, ultimately, love. A collection of mixed media drawings and installations makes us feel the weight of history.
Wa Lehulere’s works engage what he calls the “double lives” of objects, that is, the multiple ways in which a thing can be interpreted and reconfigured. This show is inspired by the concept of love, evoking the reflection of bell hooks, in the essay “Love as the Practice of Freedom” (1994), that “without love, our efforts to liberate ourselves and our community world, of oppression and exploitation is condemned. Wa Lehulere’s works also suggest that the struggle for liberation is based on love.
Wa Lehulere’s sculptural installations bring together the ghostly, haunted ephemera of our past: objects ranging from salvaged school desks, ceramic dogs, concrete and plaster to shoelaces, glass bottles, sand and chalk. Most reference and reflect on colonial and apartheid history through the language of education and ubiquitous household objects. A gallery wall of the white cube was painted emerald green, immediately catching the viewer’s eye. It was the background of the installation Redness of greens 2 (ii), 2021, in which found objects such as crutches sticking out of old suitcases – exuding a sense of historical gravity recurring in Wa Lehulere’s work – are affixed to the wall. In Bird Conference, 2017–21, fifteen birdhouses were constructed from sixteen salvaged school desks. Some erect, others overturned, they are surrounded by desks and rolls of paper strewn on the floor and are guarded by life-size dogs in black porcelain, typical ceramic decorations found in the homes of many black working-class families. from South Africa. Here they are also reminiscent of the dogs used by the apartheid-era police. They evoke both familiarity and fear.
Wa Lehulere’s practice participates in a kind of call-and-response with writers and artists who have influenced her thinking. One of her longtime inspirations is the great South African modernist painter Gladys Mgudlandlu, affectionately known as “Bird Lady” for her keen interest in painting birds. Perhaps Wa Lehulere’s birdhouses are carved to house these creatures. Mgudlandlu was also a school teacher and taught Wa Lehulere’s aunt, Sophia Lehulere, until they were forcibly evicted from their Athlone homes in Gugulethu – following the Group Areas Act, which designated certain areas as reserved for whites. The most subtle and surprisingly delicate work in the exhibition was a series of ink drawings that the artist made in collaboration with his aunt Sophia. These depict finely rendered flowers, trees and forests – wonderful, serene landscapes inspired by the hand-painted murals that adorned Mgudlandlu’s house.
In the five-page framed missive, Letter to the Nobel Committee2016, Wa Lehulere requests a posthumous prize from early 20th century linguist Sol Plaatje for his book Indigenous life in South Africa (1916), drafted in protest against the Natives Land Act of 1913. This law, which prohibited any purchase or rental of land by blacks outside certain “native reservations” representing less than 13% of the country’s landmass, resulted in massive dispossession. Wa Lehulere’s letter presents a kind of utopian vision through which social action could have set off a chain of events disrupting the sustained violence against black people in South Africa and pointing towards liberation. “Bring Back Lost Love” induced the feeling of being immersed in history and working on the ways in which stories can be told or reimagined: what would have happened if Plaatje had won the Nobel Peace Prize? Such speculations are not without real-world implications. Although its tone is not didactic, the exhibition nevertheless offers a moral instruction.
