Sven Christian [SC]: How did you get into art?

Kemang Wa Lehulere [KWL]: When I finished high school, I applied to do performing arts at CAP (Community Arts Project). Prior to that I was involved with the Cape Town Theatre Laboratory. I had signed up with the Baxteens but only attended two or three sessions, because the classes were at night and I couldn’t organise transport back home. On some other level I felt I wasn’t challenged, because I had been dabbling in theatre for a number of years. I tried to switch to a course called the Visual Arts Programme.

I thought that when I finished the diploma I would go back into theatre, but when I finished I met a lot of artists, which was something new to me. When we had a break from class I had proposed that instead of us taking leave, that the school invites practising artists to come and do workshops with us, to have a different kind of experience. They agreed to do this, and so I met these artists who were practicing and they invited me over to their studios because I was quite the loud mouth and very forward. I started making friends with them and was like, “Hey, this is quite an interesting world I didn’t know about previously.” It was intriguing, especially because I had access to theatre, television, and film – people who had been working those industries – but not the fine arts, so that was quite the curiosity for me and I think that’s what really prompted the change. Also because I was discovering the space on my own, where as previously I had cousins who worked in television and theatre, who were always my gateway into the other spaces. This one felt like it was more my own thing. In my mind I always thought I’m going back to theatre and television. Still today I have this kind of mindset, that one day I’m going to go back, but maybe it’s just a fantasy.

SC: In one of your interviews with Kathryn Smith you were talking about your cousins, Keith and Itumeleng, who were heavily involved in theatre. Your first film, Lefu la Ntate shows this influence. Do you still use a lot of that language?

KWL: I think the theatrical influence moves beyond just the aesthetic. In Lefu la Ntate the influence is more direct, but there are other examples which are more conceptual, which take the theatre format and stretch it. In some of my drawings I use stage designs with notes, and that’s because it’s things I often think about. They are my thinking processes. I tend to find those notes and sketches very interesting.

Another example is a performance I staged in 2010 called Echoes of Our Footsteps. It was based on a play Itumeleng wrote and directed in 2001. I had worked with him and my other cousin Keith on this play, who was acting in it. We travelled to Grahamstown with the play, where I sat in on the rehearsals. Witnessing the transition from the rehearsal studio onto the stage was quite a magical experience. It’s like seeing an artist in studio, seeing that process; the chaos and the madness, and the kind of teasings, pullings and pushings, and then the final moment when the thing gets refined and then ‘boom.’

I staged a performance of a rehearsal alongside a friend of mine. Conceptually I was interested in transforming the labour processes – the process of making – as the work itself, what happens when you show that process instead of the finished product. Still today I think it was one of the best performance pieces I ever made. In fact, I’m thinking of re-staging it for my solo show in Johannesburg, but we’ll see.

SC: You use so many different mediums, what makes you decide on one? Do you have the idea beforehand or do you start experimenting with things and then from that the idea is born?

KWL: The process varies. I’ll be reading a book, watching a movie, or hanging out with friends, and I’ll have an idea. I’ll then come into the studio and I’ll make notes. Sometimes I try set up and see how this thing could work, let it sit for a few days. For example, I was developing this performance piece for the show in Johannesburg in June, and was really struggling with the piece. I was writing it, rewriting, trying to imagine how it could possibly exist. In the end I decided on sculptures. That’s something I didn’t imagine when I initially had the idea.

Sometimes you know what you want to do and sometimes you just play around. Or you do something and then you look at what you’ve done and ask how can you take that further. Sometimes that process influences other pieces. I’ve been making a series of drawings for the show as well. These drawings began having a direct influence on some of the sculptural installation pieces that I’ve been struggling with, and so the drawing process kind of helps, they become the final touch to the sculptural piece. So it’s quite a mixed array of processes and directions that influence each other.

SC: It seems like a lot of your work carries on through the exhibitions. You were talking about bringing Echoes of Our Footsteps back in later?

KWL: I did Echoes of Our Footsteps to launch a project space in Johannesburg, the Centre for Historical Reenactments. There was a curator from New York there who saw the piece. She invited me to do the performance in New York, but at the time I was reluctant because of the subject matter of the piece itself. I hadn’t worked through some ideas around how I would deal with taking such a piece and staging it in New York – the reception and all the kind of ideas that one thinks about when you make the work, like what it is, because each time it’s shown in different contexts its meaning or reading can change. One also has to consider the kind of audience that would be engaging with the piece, so I never resolved those issues.

Now I feel like I would like to bring the piece back because it’s quite relevant. It deals with rape, gender violence, with cultural, traditional, and societal beliefs. On the one hand the piece deals with the clash of tradition and modernity, and the contemporary. It fuses all these things in a very messy but incredibly beautiful, powerful way. I can say this because I didn’t write the piece myself. I had first worked on the set of the play in 2001. What I did was rewrite the script from memory, and that’s what I went with. Conceptually it was a very particular kind of exercise I was doing with the piece, beyond just the theoretical breakdown of the work as a staging of a rehearsal.

SC: As an artist, what are some of your primary concerns? What are you interested in at the moment, for example?

KWL: It’s a lot of things. It’s really hard not to be affected by what’s happening around you – in the everyday – and what’s happening in the city in which I find myself now, but often I feel like one needs distance. If there’s a breaking news event, for example, it’s hard for me to jump as an artist and respond to that. Firstly, you’re dealing with the medium. How are you receiving the information? Is it the newspaper, the internet, social media platforms…? You break it down, what’s actually happening? Has it happened before? So one has to, at least in my opinion, take time.

In the future I would like to make work around women who are standing up against rape culture in South Africa. The Echoes of Our Footsteps piece kind of speaks to that already, but not in a way of standing up against it necessarily. It speaks to it in complicated ways, which is why I feel like it’s become quite relevant again to re-stage.

I would also be curious in finding other ways of how to engage the subject, but as it stands I feel like it’s too soon to respond directly to it because I need time to process and think, to strategise and let the things sink in.

I’m interested in history repeating itself. I’m interested in contemporary moments which feel similar to historical moments and events. I use history to understand the present. I know it’s becoming cliché now, this thing of using history as a means of understanding the present, but it really does help. You can read the present differently because you have a historical understanding of politics, geography or economics. In the same way if you were a medical doctor, understanding the history of illnesses or medication might help you deal with a disease outbreak/epidemic. It’s important to know.

Recently I’ve been following people praising Beyonce’s video album, Lemonade. There’s this one shot where she’s smashing the window of a car with a baseball bat. I’ve been watching people’s commentary around this, studying them, trying to follow who is saying what about it. Funny enough, none of them mention Pipilotti Rist, the Swiss artist.

That scene comes directly from a work she did in 1997, but everyone else is reading something different. In the same way, Kanye West featured on this song with Katy Perry. The song is called ET, so you’re dealing with this idea of being extra-terrestrial. If you look at the imagery, Katy Perry is floating in space in this dress. Berni Searle's Home and Away deals with immigrant issues; people crossing into Europe via the ocean, the number of deaths, and the politics involved in this situation of catastrophic proportions.

If you know this work then you understand. I might be interested in what’s going on now but I’m also interested to see how I can read things and how things are repeated over time; how they change with repetition, or don’t change.

SC: Why the chalk?

KWL: With chalk I like the possibility of impermanence. The first time I did a chalk mural I had developed this text, which reads something like, "Dear hole, since I do not like forever, I would like to invent the future.

I read a text that wrote of you as a noun, but I’ve always thought of you as a verb, so maybe we could start by remembering the future as a verb." The line there that is important is "Dear hole, since I do not like forever I’d like to invent the future." This line is key in understanding my choice of chalk. It’s not like oil. If one wipes it than that’s it. It’s beginning to become quite violent actually, to make all these drawings and then they just disappear. But it’s part of the process. To a certain extent it can develop into something else. It can change, it can have many other lives. Initially I was interested in history as a palimpsest; this constant writing and erasure, writing and erasure. The performance piece Echoes of Our Footsteps dealt with the very same thing, but in a performative way, with different results, a different emotional and psychological impact.

SC: Maybe you can talk to us a bit about the exhibition you did for the Standard Bank Young Artist Award, History Will Break Your Heart? What historical examples were you using for that exhibition?

KWL: For History Will Break Your Heart, Hans Ulrich Obrist approached me sometime towards the end of 2014 with footage that he had shot of Ernest Mancoba. I think the footage was the last interview that was done with him before he died. This video had never been seen before and he lost some of the video material. There was a show coming up in Belgium which was looking at the modernist pioneers, so to speak. Ernest Mancoba was going to be one of the people that the show was going to focus on. He asked me if I wanted to do anything with the material. I watched it and I was like ‘shit’! I got excited and scared at the same time. Like ok, it’s really interesting material, but the sensitivity required… and it involved a lot of editing, taking out background sounds. It was quite a messy interview. Mancoba was old, really really old, and frail. His memory had deteriorated.

I started working on the material and then thought it would be an interesting project to carry to the Standard Bank show. Around the same time I was visiting my aunt in Gugulethu. I was busy editing this video when one of the neighbours saw my car outside. She had this book on Gladys Mgudlandlu and asked if I might have a use for it, since I’m an artist and what not.

My aunt asked to see the book and she was like “Oh my God, I knew this woman!” That made sense, because she was from Gugulethu, but it didn't really mean anything that she knew Gladys Mgudlandlu until she started telling her stories about the murals she had seen in Mgudlandlu’s house. That’s when I started perking up, like “What, you’d seen murals in Mgudlandlu’s house? Ok, now this is something, you know! These murals might still be there!” Either way, I found it really interesting and exciting. So I embarked on a project of trying to discover/uncover the murals.

When I went to visit the house there were no murals. They had been painted over. In fact it didn’t look like there could be any murals there. I worked with a woman called Bettina Elten, who is a professional art restorer/ conservator. She did the actual work on the walls, but it took many months before we could actually start working on the walls.

There was this back and forth in the process. I had been talking to some folks at a camera hiring company, who were going to give me this Hasselblad X-ray/Infra-red camera to scan the wall, before doing any actual work on the physical walls. The camera was meant to be shipped in from Sweden and according to the local person I was in contact with, the camera had never been used to any significant result so the trade off was that I would allow Hasselblad to use my material to advertise the camera, which I was okay with. In the end, there were complications and I never got the camera, which is a pity, because I had written this documentary/art film which would incorporate all these various elements in a very poetic way. It spoke to the murals existence, or non-existence. In the end we went with the physical peeling of layers of the paint and the plaster.

SC: I’m quite interested in the translation from that process into the gallery space. How do you try harness the essence of this history and bring it into a space for people to engage with?

KWL: Of course there’s a question of how you bring that project into a gallery space or a museum, but I don’t think for me that’s really worthy enough of a question. It’s a question that some of the land artists of the 80s were facing when they brought elements or documentation of their projects inside four walls. For me it’s about the actual project. The fact that the thing exists, you know? For me it’s a documentation of the project, but to a certain extent the document becomes the work itself.

SC: But what about people that haven’t done their research, that don’t know these specific stories? These people must lose a lot of value entering the exhibition space, because they’re just not familiar with the origins of the work?

KWL: I tried to make the video in a way that contextualises the work – the process, how it came about. I invited my aunt into studio, for example. I recreated Gladys Mgudlandlu’s living room as a blackboard, and then asked her to recreate the murals. Of course she’s never had any training in art whatsoever. She’d never made any drawings before, actually. To ask her to do that kind of thing in front of a camera was almost violent. So we had to stop at some point, because it just felt like it was a bit too much. I asked her if she would come back and recreate the drawings in her own time, without any cameras. The idea was that I would document these and include them in the video, but I quite liked what was happening when she came back. I felt like I wanted to include her drawings as works in the show, which I paired with some Gladys Mgudlandlu’s works I had managed to acquire after they were auctioned off in London last year.

It’s really hard, because how do you contextualise something that happens elsewhere? It’s an uncovering of a mural that hasn’t been seen for more than fifty years. For me the project seemed like it was the beginning of something else, which is not something I’ve been afraid of, to put up work that is not finished. Again, coming back to the Echoes of Our Footsteps performance piece. I put it up because I felt an urgency around the project. The responses have been really, really incredible.

A few weeks ago I held a workshop in Gugulethu with a number of people who were helping me develop the project. What is seen in History Will Break Your Heart is just the beginning of a much larger project. I would like to uncover the murals fully, and possibly turn the house into a museum or a monument, but of course within a conceptual and critical framework. There are a lot of problems around museums and monuments. I’m using these terminologies now for lack of a better word, because the project is still under research. How it will end up in the end is still very open-ended. Ideally I would like to have project space attached to it; a library, a cinema… It’s quite an ambitious and long-term project in terms of how I imagine it. And it’s not really about Gladys Mgudlandlu now. It’s about using that discovery as a springboard for a number of other ideas, ideas I have had for years and some that extend on the Gugulective ideas.

So in terms of people coming to the show and understanding what’s going on, it requires some patience, because it’s a long journey. It is also important to note that most of the works on that show are not mine (as in I hand-made them), however, that does not make them ‘not my work.’ But that’s another conversation. It’s like you’re seeing the process of something unfolding, which I’d like to believe is quite a privileged thing for people to experience.

SC: So those murals are still visible? Have they been painted back over since the project?

KWL: The guy who lives at the house said I could do whatever I want on the walls, as long as I restore them back to the condition I found them in. So I was like “sure, it’s fine. I’ll pay someone to fix your walls.” I told him there might be these murals, not really sure if there actually were any. But then we found the murals. It was a dilemma, especially because of the number of layers we uncovered. Do we cover them up now, because then we’re destroying them? I pleaded with him to be patient. The paintings have been under two layers of plaster and seven layers of paint for all these decades, which means that the works have been preserved and protected. Once we uncover them, then they’re prone to damage, so we only uncovered a small portion of her work.

There was this curio piece that was hanging on the wall. Bettina said that if there was something there, we couldn’t just uncover the thing and leave it like that, so we had to identify parts of the wall where there were things hanging. If you walk into the house you can’t see that there’s this mural there. There’s this other thing which is hanging over it. That was a deliberate strategy to safe keep the artworks. They could be uncovered, but then they would also have to be preserved. It’s quite a laborious process, which Bettina has been very keen to come and do, and to even train someone in the process. This kind of discipline is not offered in any institution of study in the country at the moment. So on the other hand, there are other things that are coming out.

A professor from the University of Cape Town called me last year and said “Hey, this is fucking incredible. We need to start putting this in the curriculum – conservation and the kind of work you just did.” Hopefully if people are interested in doing conservation the universities will respond to that.

SC: Let’s talk about Gugulective for a bit. You started that in 2006 with Unathi Sigenu. What prompted the formation of this group and how do you think the collective functioned in bringing cultural discourse home, back into Gugulethu versus in the white cube spaces?

KWL: I think there are a number of key things that prompted the formation of Gugulective. One of them being accessibility. Cape Town is still a very racially divided city. As a result, accessibility to art, to museums, to the theatre, is very limited, depending on your race, where you live and your income bracket. We wanted to do something in the neighbourhood where we were from.

I was working in television at the time, so I wore many hats. I was doing research, writing, sound, lighting, and was a trainee director. Then there was Gugulective on the side. In the end I walked away from television to pursue the work we were doing with Gugulective. I found it more exciting. It was free. We weren’t being told how to do things. With the Gugulective there was a sense of urgency about the work that we were doing. There was a sense of importance beyond just telling a story to earn some money. In fact, we never earned money with the Gugulective for a long time. Even today the money we’ve made is so minimal it’s kind of ridiculous, but it wasn’t about that. It was really about us wanting to create a space that could have a social impact on our communities; a space where we could determine our own sociability, and even though momentarily, determine the terms of our own existence.

We wanted to create a space which was not conservative in outlook, without the stratification of labour or skills. We worked with poets, musicians… It was really about creating an alternative space that was not governed by the norms or rules of the mainstream art world. Where we could do whatever the fuck we wanted to do. And then of course there was the knowledge of the kinds of discourses that were happening in the art world, in the galleries and the museums. At the time the stronghold of the commercial gallery hadn’t made its presence felt as much as it is now.

It wasn’t something that we were even that concerned about. It’s not like we were anti-commercial gallery. We were aware of the museum as a site for the construction of discourses for a larger socio-historical narrative, which was one of our curiosities, but these were not spaces we were obsessed with. In fact, we found it kind of laughable that there were symposiums or seminars and talks that would be hosted around black issues, in a museum that had no black people in it except black artists in the art world. Wouldn’t you benefit more if you had the symposiums there, where the people live? Logically it just made no sense to us, so we were like, ok fuck it, let’s do our own shit. Let’s do our own discourses, on our own terms, and we do them there in the community and we see how people respond. We had one of the best responses to artworks that I’ve ever seen. Very honest, spontaneous, and just on point, without the kind of snobbishness of the conservative art world trying to theorise everything.

In the end it was really just about doing our own shit and having fun in the process. It was very important to do the politics in an enjoyable way. And then of course we figured if you could pull some people into the township who wouldn't necessarily go there, without making them voyeurs, that would also be a fantastic thing to do, to create a bridge for our racially divided society.

In a sense one was able to break the top down, hierarchal structure of the apartheid urban planning scheme. We started to create a traffic that moved in-between, which was incredible. The number of people who came to our exhibitions, who were inspired by our conversations, who were inspired by our artworks, by the talks, the screenings, by the questions we were asking… People who went and pursued university careers who’d actually gone out and studied and who felt like they could do things… On that level there was an impact which unfortunately one can’t quantify. But it’s not about quantifying it at the end of the day, it’s about really making that impact. No matter how small it is.

SC: Speaking of opportunity, let’s talk about the Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year Award. Do you know what work you’re going to be producing for it? Have you started to map that?

KWL: I’m curious to explore the drawing relationship that I have with my aunt, because she continued making drawings without me knowing. I was abroad and my cousin Kebone (her daughter) would send me pictures on WhatsApp of the drawings. I was like fucking hell! I actually wanted to collaborate with her for this solo show that I’m doing now in June. We’ve been talking and she’s been doing some work. I’m not sure if it will be ready for the show, or if I’ll be happy with how to present it, so we’ll see about the solo show I have in June, but definitely for the Deutsche Bank. It’s something that I’m really hoping to focus on and push very strongly. I’m curious to see what kind of relationship will come out of it.

When my aunt was coming into the studio to recreate the murals that she remembered seeing as a teenager, I’d set her up in studio with these blackboards and some chalk. She always felt a certain kind of preciousness towards these blackboards, even though I was like, “it’s chalk, it’s fine. You can erase it.”

It was intimidating because she’s not trained in any kind of art anything. She started making sketches on A4 pages, and then she would re-do the sketches on the blackboards. I felt like her preparatory sketches were more exciting, because she was using pen on paper. The chalk has its own kind of specific materiality which directs the mark making. So I got her some sketchbooks and bought her a variety of pens. The pens I had were all black pens because I had been working in a very monochromatic scheme. I thought hey, let me not limit her, so I got all sorts of colours and things. I got inspired to work in colour because of the drawings that she was making. You will see this in the new body of work that I’m doing. That’s one thinking strand I have, which I’m quite set to explore. I also have other ideas which I’m still sitting with and meditating on.

SC: It’s an exciting prospect, to have a significant period of time and resources to dedicate towards an exhibition…

KWL: I think it’s important to have time to work on something. At university we had a turn-around of three weeks for a project, which helps in training you to think fast and spontaneously, but there are certain limitations that can come with that. With my aunt I really feel like I need the time. She’s an outsider artist so to speak. At least that’s how she would be defined by the art world, but the drawings that she’s been making are really nice, better than mine actually!

SC: How did you hear about the award? You must’ve been pleasantly surprised?

KWL: Yes I was! I was in London at the time. I got an email from this guy who said he was from Deutsche Bank, and that he wanted to meet with me. I thought that they wanted to buy some works, because I had a show at Gasworks (London) at the time, and I had all these chalkboard drawings. He said he wanted to meet with me, and that I could choose any restaurant I’d like, which was a lot of pressure. I chose Nando’s, by the train station, let’s keep it simple! So the guy flew over to London to meet with me and then he asked me if I knew about the award. I told him I did. When he asked me about it I thought he was going to ask if I would be ok being shortlisted for it, based on how he was approaching the subject matter but also considering I have turned down nominations for awards before, but then he told me I’d been selected to receive the award. At first I misunderstood him, so I was like “Ok, that’s interesting,” but I think my response was so underwhelming to him that he felt a bit like, “ok… really?” And then I realised what he was actually saying and asked, “Hey, what did you just say?” It was really incredible. I was like “Oh my God! Really, are you sure?”