Artists

Noria Mabasa

Joyce Mabasa

Noria Mabasa has been making art since the 1960s, yet public knowledge of her work is still very limited, framed by a handful of people who sought to revise the exclusionary nature of South Africa’s institutions in the mid-to-late 1980s and integrate her work into the commercial sphere.

In 1985, when her art was included in the exhibition Tributaries, it was categorised as ‘rural transitional,’ a framework that has a lasting impact on the reception of her work (Mdluli 2015, 60). Unable to grasp the full complexity of her practice, yet eager to find a home for it within the canon of South African art, the term ‘transitional’ applied to works that did not fit neatly into pre-existing categories such as ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’ (2015, 60), but were thought to occupy a liminal zone between the two. Similarly, the term ‘rural’ — which is often associated with tradition (and therefore, the past) — presented a romanticised view of her work, untainted by the world at large or the passage of time.

Framed through a Eurocentric lens, such categories have led to a variety of misconceptions. Amongst these is the understanding that she began making clay figures for the Domba initiation ceremonies, as opposed to making works that were later used in them, and that she began carving in wood because of Nelson Mukhuba, implying that the impetus came from him rather than of her own fruition, thus undermining her subversive decision to carve in a medium that had been the exclusive domain of men (Klopper 2017).

Other readings tend to emphasise the artist’s ethnicity and the mythological associations of her practice at the expense of her everyday lived experience. Offering an alternative to the mythological place of crocodiles in Mabasa’s work, for example, Sandra Klopper retells the story of how the artist’s granddaughter narrowly escaped the clutches of a large crocodile, and how she was witness to a man being pulled under by another, surfacing moments later while ‘trapped in the reptile’s jaws’ (2017, 125). Such stories open up a complex world of different interpretations that help to ground readings of the artist’s practice in the everyday. At the same time, it is clear that we do not understand much about the place of dreams and the role of the ancestors in her work.

To this end, the initial installment of Noria Mabasa: Shaping Dreams – held in NIROX’s Residency Studio during the time of her residency (23 May – 6 June 2022) – asked what assumptions we bring to the work of Noria Mabasa, questioning the extent to which our knowledge is informed by things that have little to do with the artist.

Its title acknowledges the artist’s dreams as a source of inspiration, emphasising her hand in the work’s making, her role as a mentor, and her determination to carve out a place for herself in an otherwise hostile world. At the same time, it asks that we question our own myth-making processes, taking the opportunity provided by her residency to talk directly with the artist in order to enable a deeper and varied conversation with her practice.

Held at the Villa-Legodi Centre for Sculpture, the second iteration has, in some sense, built on from the various conversations that were had. Its construction reflects some of the challenges that emerged from the initial show, in particular the various ways in which we narrate or tell the story of artworks through curatorial conventions and archival practices that are by-and-large taken for granted in the (Western) art world.

Two moments stand out for me in this regard. The first occurred whilst visiting the artist’s home and studio in Tshino, Limpopo – the Vhutshila Arts and Crafts Centre. Having selected works for the exhibition, it came time to gather details related to each – titles, medium, dimensions, and so on. When pressed for titles of her work, however, Mam Noria often opted for the anecdotal, preferring to tell lengthy stories about each work. Frustrated by my insistence on titles, she would often resort to saying things like, “Can’t you see? That’s a mother and child.”

What became apparent is how deeply ingrained the process of cataloguing works is. It reminded me of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s book, Silencing the Past (1995), in particular his writing about how history often arrives prepackaged, cleansed of the messiness of its ‘processional character’ so as to accomodate ‘travel agents, airlines, politicians, the media, or the states, who sell it in prepackaged forms by which the public has come to expect history to present itself for immediate consumption’ (1995: 113).

At the time of the initial exhibition, it had felt wrong to distill Mam Noria’s anecdotes into bite-size titles, something which I raised with Nontobeko Ntombela during a public discussion on the day of the opening in May. Her suggestion was quite simply: include the whole anecdote.

Taking Ntombela’s lead, the next question was how to go about doing that. Was it a case of simply recording and transcribing what was said? Should the anecdotes be translated into English or left in their original form? Although all of these recordings were translated, the eventual decision was to include only some of the English translations; an attempt to reverse the logic of monolingualism; to foreground the possibility that not everything can be easily understood and consumed; to emphasise that meaningful engagement is as much about the acknowledgement of not being able to understand as it is its inverse; to acknowledge that which gets lost in translation; and to foreground the fact that, through cultural difference, there is much that I and many others who will attend the show simply cannot or will not understand.

Importantly, the absence of English translations also provides an honest reflection on the power dynamics involved throughout the process of putting these exhibitions together, and Mam Noria’s insistence that everything be done on her terms.

The second moment occurred on the morning of her exhibition opening in May. I can’t recall the exact nature of my question. I think I had asked if she would be willing to talk about her work. Her response was, ‘But it’s not me.’ The implication was that she does not view herself as the author of her work, but rather as a conduit for the ancestors – a direct challenge to the idea of authorship and the prevailing celebration of the artist-genius.

Such encounters with Mam Noria remind me of something that Olu Oguibe said during in a recent webinar, titled “The Question of ‘Africanness’ and the Expanded Field of Sculpture,” namely that:

The encounter between African art and European art, especially at the end of the nineteenth and the turn of the twentieth centuries, stripped the latter of its pretentious and often misinformed allusions to classical Greek and Roman art... [and] liberated European and eventually all modern and contemporary artists globally, and gave them license, as it were, to think of art and form and colour and concept in entirely new ways and without inhibition or limitations on the imagination.

Noria Mabasa’s preference for story-telling over titling, her refusal to view herself as the sole creator of her work, or to produce work that can be easily classified and contained, possesses a liberatory potential that extends beyond the practice of art making to the curatorial, and the ways in which to communicate, document, and archive our cultural histories.