Sarah And Some Gentlemen, Diptych ,2014
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Notes : Partly Influenced and informed by Sapeurs, Simphiwe Ndzube's work is at once playful and menacing. The La Sape movement – an abbreviation based on the phrase Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes (French for ‘Society of Ambiance-Makers and Elegant People’), and referencing the French slang word sape (attire) – is a subculture which originated in the cities of Kinshasa and Brazzaville in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Republic of Congo respectively, and has now spread across the continent. The movement embodies the elegance in style and manners of colonial dandies, passed on from generation to generation. Sapeurism can be traced back to the colonial period when slaves chose to subvert the oppression exerted by their European masters by adapting and embellishing the coloniser's style with their own exaggerated high-fashion reimagining of European period costume.Loaded with these and other more politicised historical references, Ndzube's work depicts the disenfranchised on the outskirts of society. He creates portraits of figures that reflect on the struggle many South Africans have in trying to cope with the legacy of colonial and apartheid history while at the same time inhabiting their agency in forging a new future, becoming the subjects of their own making.
The figures in this work, though playful and carnivalesque, are simultaneously imbued with an underlying menacing character. They express the dangers inherent in the unpredictability and unknown quantity of the ‘Other’ and play on the inherent ambivalences of prevailing sentiments around freedom and inclusivity in a ‘new’ South Africa.The title is also a reference to Sarah Baartman, who stands out as the primary figure depicted in the work, in a pose reminiscent of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Ambiguously emerging from a pool and standing on a display podium, she is bedecked in a wig and regal sceptre with flowers at her feet, heightening the tension between readings of the figure as monarch or as colonial anthropological curiosity. She is a model of royal dignity, surrounded by the ominous gentlemanly dandies under her dominion, populating a space that defies physics – a premonition contrasted with apocalyptic sky and decorative floral motifs adorning the ground. The figures are positioned on the precipice of a time gone by, stepping into a new, though sometimes compromised, future.
Ruarc Peffers
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