Untitled (Metamorphosis 2) ,2015
Provenance : Private collection, Cape Town.
WHATIFTHEWORLD Gallery, Cape Town.
Exhibited : Brunei Gallery, SOAS University of London, London, 'Mohau Modisakeng: Beyond the Liminal Space', 12 July to 23 September 2016.; Tyburn Gallery, London, 'Mohau Modisakeng: Bophirima', 10 June to 17 September 2016.; Kunstraum Innsbruck, Innsbruck, 'Mohau Modisakeng: Ke Kgomo Ya Moshate', 5 September to 24 October 2015.
Literature : Mokoena, H., Simbao, R. and Jamal, A. (2016). 'Mohau Modisakeng'. Cape Town: WHATIFTHEWORLD; London: Tyburn Gallery; Amsterdam: Galerie Ron Mandos; Johannesburg: Standard Bank, another example from the edition illustrated in colour on p. 83.
Notes : Mohau Modisakeng was born in Soweto in 1986 and lives and works in Cape Town. He completed his undergraduate and Masters degrees at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town graduating in 2014. In 2016, Modisakeng was awarded the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art, and in 2011 he was awarded the SASOL New Signatures Award. This work, from 2012, is an unusual example in its materiality. This hieroglyphic grid of symbolic weaponry, comprising an Okapi knife, a spear and knobkerrie, an axe and an AK47, seems to suggest a set of figures cancelling out each weapon in modified prohibitions. The darker side of the equation is that these are all characteristically South African weapons of anti-apartheid struggle, violent crime or gangsterism. The overdetermination of each object’s symbolic meaning in South African life provides the work with its gravitas and poignancy.
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