MOSHEKWA LANGA AT KUNSTINSTITUUT MELLY, ROTTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS

On October 24, Kunstinstituut Melly will open You will find us in the best places, a major survey exhibition of South African artist Moshekwa Langa. Featuring nearly 120 works from the past three decades, the exhibition will occupy the entire building, making it the largest overview of Moshekwa’s work to be presented in the Netherlands, where he has lived for more than 25 years. 

Emerging in the early years of post-apartheid South Africa, Moshekwa belongs to a generation of artists who worked with the new enthusiasm sweeping through the country at the time and the curiosity toward a world that was opening up after decades of international solidarity through cultural sanctions and boycotts. His work was widely exhibited at international biennials beginning in 1997 with his participation in the Johannesburg Biennale, the Havana Biennial, and the Istanbul Biennial, and followed by biennials in São Paulo (1998 and 2010), Gwangju (2000), and Venice (2003 and 2009). In 1997, Moshekwa moved to the Netherlands to join the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten residency, where he sought an international artistic community that would challenge and inform his practice, while allowing his work to remain resistant to easy categorization. His meteoric rise was due in part to his fearless handling of materials from his immediate environment. Using what is considered banal and “everyday” to create complex imagery, his work is characterized by wit and irreverence, while his astute awareness of material is reflected in the layers of meaning that emerge through repeated encounters with unconventional materials such as coffee, nail polish, lipstick, staples, yarn, car varnish, newspaper, coal, refuse bags, and tape.

Having grown up in Bakenberg in the province of Limpopo, Moshekwa later encountered official South African maps that did not feature his hometown. His recurring interest in mapping reflects apartheid South Africa’s selective cartographies and has informed a conceptual concern with the politics of landlessness, mapping, and borders. These concerns take different forms throughout his oeuvre, from lines woven across paper to installations of spools of thread, bodies of water, childhood memories and observations of a landscape shaped by history. 

Rather than reaching conclusions, ideas in Moshekwa’s practice return, repeat, and begin again. Works may start and only be finished years later; chronology and linearity are not employed, things begin again, beginnings are continuous, and instead of conclusions there are pauses and ellipses. Time is nebulous and elastic. Curated by Gabi Ngcobo, director of Kunstinstituut Melly, with curator Kabelo Malatsie, You will find us in the best places offers a pause to reflect on Moshekwa’s practice across three decades. The exhibition is choreographed to reveal recurring themes, questions, and interests, marking time not linearly, but through their continuous unfolding across Moshekwa’s practice.