This paper aims to provide a descriptive analysis of the materials, used in Rita Mukebo’s practice, their site-specificity, and how they serve to both anchor and weave together a series of performed and projected encounters with her practice. In it, I focus on her installation performance Muchanga (2012), paying particular attention to how materials have been employed in the artist’s practice and to what effect, before discussing their significance within the context of Lubumbashi (Democratic Republic of Congo) and the potential for misinterpretation. In so doing, I try to anticipate a number of assumptions that may arise from Mukebo’s residency in Johannesburg, South Africa (2019). To this end, I also discuss the historical context of the residency and some of the challenges faced therein.

The difficulty of thinking beyond representation

Producing new work, in a new environment, for new audiences, often presents a challenge for artists-in-residence. On the one hand, there is an anxiety about whether or not the work will be understood or well-received. On the other is a sense of opportunity – new audiences can mean a chance to dabble in artistic modes that one may have been hesitant to experiment with in more familiar circles (Mahashe 2019). At the same time, residencies provide host institutions and their publics with an opportunity to engage artistic practices from beyond their immediate environment.

As described by Hito Steyerl and Boris Buden, artist-in-residence programmes offer an opportunity for exchange within a hybridised public sphere (2007: 234-235). At the same time, they are often “heavily embedded in national representations ... influenced by the illusion of origin [and] the belief in an essential character of national culture” (Steyerl & Buden 2007: 229). In this way, they conclude, “residencies express the difficulty of thinking beyond representation” (2007: 232).

This is particularly true of Rita Mukebo’s residency, which forms part of an ongoing collaboration between the Wits History of Art and Heritage Management department, Centre d’art Waza, Wits Art Museum (WAM), and the Musée National de Lubumbashi (MNL). Although it may not be overt in the work that Mukebo has produced, the organising principle behind the residency is, in part, shaped by the historical expropriation of objects from Belgian Congo, which now form part of WAM’s collection.

Between the late 1920s and 1940s, such objects were acquired by Wits University’s Department of Bantu Studies (Leibhammer & Rankin-Smith 1992: 15). Removed from their context of production, these objects were often presented to an unfamiliar public in an ahistorical and essentialist light, which “underwrote the colonial logic of cultural guardianship” (van Beurden 2015: 7). As Sarah van Beurden points out:

[The production of] “authentic cultural traditions” as a defi ning category for the identity (and identification) of Congolese cultures [also] closed that category off to contemporary Congolese people by viewing the present through the prism of cultural decline – inventing a present, as much as a past (2015: 7).

Although no longer read through the same ethnographic lens, this prescriptive present, and similar narratives of decline, continue to shadow our understanding of contemporary life in the DRC. We see this in the prevailing rhetoric circulating the work of Mukebo, which is often said to critique power structures, “speak[ing] out against drugs, AIDS [and] war” (Bindika 2019). Such rhetoric – often mediated through foreign philanthropic organisations like the United Nations and the Institut Français (Mudekereza 2019) – may be true of particular projects, yet the lack of critical engagement surrounding her context, methodology, or choice of materials raises important questions about the validity of such claims and the mediatory role of such institutions, which tend to solidify and subsume her practice within their own over-arching objectives [1]. In order to avoid falling into the same trap, it is important that we remain cognisant of the motivations (both past and present) that underpin Mukebo’s residency.

Tabled in 1978, the original sponsorship agreement between Wits and Standard Bank Investment Incorporation was intended to “establish a trust with the aim of ‘acquiring, maintaining, preserving, and exhibiting a collection of African tribal art forms’” (Charlton 2015: 21). This agreement was laced with similar narratives of cultural decline, in particular the need – made reference to by Julia Charlton in her paper ‘What’s in the Storerooms? Unpacking the genesis and growth of the Wits Art Museum Collections’ (2015) – “to preserve the nation’s heritage of those African skills which are gradually disappearing, due to urbanisation and industrialisation” (2015: 21) [2]. This, despite the fact that similar, trans-continental forces had a role in shaping this very same heritage [3].

It is clear, through the writing of Nessa Leibhammer and Fiona Rankin-Smith (1992), that such perspectives – which maintained “a somewhat romantic perception of an unchanging and untainted past” (Charlton 2015: 21) – were being called into question by the early 1990s, and that the focal point for many of those involved in the research and exhibition of such objects at Wits Art Galleries (and later, WAM) had undergone a gradual shift to accommodate a more self-reflexive position:

... To focus on and research the objects as self evident, coherent and comprehensive examples of ‘Luba material culture’, is not feasible. What emerges as a more appropriate line of investigation is to examine the material both written and collected as an ‘artefact’ or an event within our own culture rather than a ‘frozen moment in another’ (Leibhammer & Rankin-Smith 1992: 18) [4].

In 2004, the sponsorship agreement was modifi ed to include a Deed of Trust, opting for the “[preservation of] African art forms representative of the continuation of traditions of art making in Africa” (Charlton 2015: 21). The implication, Charlton argues, is a shift “that includes an acknowledgement of changing art forms and contexts” (2015: 21). By 2015, this contract also included “a provision that 5% of the grant be allocated towards the purchase of contemporary African art, [thus] recognising the importance of the collection at WAM refl ecting relationships between past and present” (2015: 21-22).

It is within this general trajectory that we should understand the opening of WAM’s doors to contemporary artists from the DRC. It is also for this reason that we should consider the effects of a potentially narrow, nationalistic, collection-centred, and otherwise abstracted perspective of the past on the interpretation of Mukebo’s current work.

Muchanga (2012)

In thinking about the kinds of interpretations we might anticipate from Mukebo’s residency, it is worth providing a descriptive account of her performance, Muchanga (2012), which was organised by the Institut Français at the Halle de l’Etoile in Lubumbashi. In video documentation of the performance, Mukebo can be seen sitting on top of a white sheet, inside a large plastic bag (Muchanga 2012). There is a small tub of blue paint on the floor beside her, as well as a number of individual used paint tubes, palette knives and brushes that have been suspended from the ceiling. Beneath these, Mukebo appears to be wrestling with the plastic. It looks uncomfortable, a feeling that is amplified by the glare of a bright blue spotlight attached to the ceiling directly above. On the wall behind is a square-format painting of three abstracted figures. Looking at the painting, the two figures to the right appear as dark silhouettes against a white backdrop. In contrast, the figure to the far left is painted in profi le against a red backdrop. The foregrounded figure appears bent backwards so that the chest protrudes to the edge of the frame. Their head is tilted back as if waiting to let out a deep breath. It is a highly energised, somewhat claustrophobic painting – a fitting backdrop for the performance taking place on the gallery floor in front.

As the performance progresses, however, it becomes apparent that the blue we are seeing is not just a reflection projected off the plastic from the light above. Mukebo is actually painting the plastic blue from the inside, colouring it with her body and hands. Once the plastic has been lifted, she continues to rub the paint into her clothes, arms, cheeks, and hair. Placing the plastic and paint to one side, she then stands up and walks out of the frame.

The title of the performance, Muchanga, means ‘in society’ (Mukebo 2019). As such, one might assume that the plastic foil functions as something of a metaphor for society and its oppressive impact on the artist. Once pushed to the side, however, what becomes apparent is that the plastic was always secondary – a nuisance, perhaps, but certainly not the principal focus of her attention (although it may have been our’s). She is painting, regardless of the plastic. In this way, the plastic is used in very powerful yet subtle ways, highlighting the artist’s agency and a much more intimate relationship with the tools of her trade.

This gesture implies a shift towards the audience’s expectations and a very particular failure of the imagination to grapple with the complexities of context. In many ways, the use of plastic functions as a metaphor for these very projections. To be ‘in society’ here is not to inhabit space, but to grapple with what it means to be seen to inhabit a very particular space. That this ‘struggle’ is performed within the confi nes of the gallery is not secondary to its meaning either. On the contrary, its site-specificity provides an important entry for understanding the subversive capacity of the work.

A penchant for spectacle

One wonders about the reception that such work might engender within the context of South Africa. How readily might we accept the simplistic interpretation: ‘a performance installation about the struggles of being an artist from Lubumbashi’, without trying to grasp the nuances? One of the positive outcomes of a residency in Johannesburg is that it forces us to consider the work in relation to our immediate environment: not as something that can be kept at arm’s length – something over ‘there’ – but as something that is here, and now. Yet the production of new work in South Africa inevitably calls for its own string of associations and questions, born both from the material used, the site of exhibition, as well as our understanding of the artist and her work. What kind of projections are we prone to, for example?

Interestingly, Njabulo Ndebele’s paper, ‘The Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Some New Writings in South Africa’ (1991), also employed the metaphor of a wrestling match in order to grapple with South Africa’s “penchant for the spectacular” (1991: 40). As Ndebele writes, the artistic imagination of South Africa has historically been concerned, “only in the outward, obvious signs of individual or social behaviour [to the extent that] there is very little attempt to delve into intricacies of motive or social process. People and situations are either very good or very bad” (1991: 39). Ndebele argues that our tendency to gravitate towards the most-shocking aspects of society stems from the proliferation and overwhelming impact of everyday, somewhat normalised forms of oppression and violence:

The visible symbols of the overwhelmingly oppressive South African social formation appear to have prompted over the years the development of a highly dramatic, highly demonstrative form of literary representation. One is reminded here of Roland Barthes’s essay on wrestling. Some of Barthes’s observations on the wrestling match seem particularly apposite. ‘The virtue of all-in wrestling,’ Barthes opens his essay, ‘is that it is the spectacle of excess.’ It is the manifest display of violence and brutality that captures the imaginations of the spectators ... The overwhelming form is the method of displaying the culture of oppression to the utmost in bewilderment (1991: 38-39).

Found within the nexus of the everyday, such ‘excesses’ and their symbolic home in an ‘overwhelming form’ make the reading of Mukebo’s Muchanga all the more poignant. This “spectacle of excess” is also, at base, an inevitable companion of performance art. Here, the noises of the city might become the siren call of the work; the muteness of the gallery its cold counterpart. Underneath it all, however, is the artist and the variety of subjectivities that make up the audience, to the point where there really is no one way of interpreting such an immense condensation of meanings, all of which contribute to the overall outcome of the project.

On the one hand, this makes the work susceptible to the kind of pigeonholing that we would like to avoid; on the other, it proffers a generosity on behalf of the artist that may enable South African publics to recognise themselves in the work. The challenge faced has thus been to create a platform through which the artist’s particular subjectivities, concerns, and their associative links within this new context are not overshadowed by the institution’s own imperatives, but rather create a meeting point through which a common ground of critical enquiry can be established.

Endnotes

[1] In a recent discussion, Patrick Mudekereza, founding member of Centre d’art Waza, Lubumbashi, acknowledged that the Institut Français has helped to create a space for an otherwise isolated community of Congolese artists to engage an international platform (2019: 4:00). At the same time, however, he points out that the Institut Français was also “trying to shape the way we see ourselves, and to [position] France as the main [point of] reference” (2019: 4:00).

[2] It is through the sponsorship agreement with Standard Bank that WAM has, since 1978, been able to support the continued acquisition of cultural material objects from the DRC and other regions of the continent (Charlton 2015: 20).

[3] Sarah van Beurden has highlighted the impact of trade relations between Europe, Central Africa, and the East in shaping a market for “ivory objects such as spoons, salt cellars, and decorated horns [which were] made specifi cally for Europeans” in the DRC during the 19th and 20th centuries (2015: 4).

[4] The paper from which this excerpt is drawn formed part of the exhibition catalogue, The Collection of W.F.P Burton: Of Course You Would Not Want a Canoe (1992), which took place at WAM that same year.