Untitled Hieroglyph ,2012
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Note : Mohau Modisakeng was born in Soweto in 1986 and lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. He completed his undergraduate degree at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town in 2009 and was awarded the Merrill Lynch Scholarship. He worked towards his Masters degree at the same institution, graduating in 2014. In 2016, Modisakeng was awarded the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art, one of the foremost art awards in Africa. He was also also awarded the SASOL New Signatures Award, Pretoria, South Africa for 2011.Modisakeng’s practice is based largely on explorations of political and social violence acted out on the black body, in film, photographs and performative installation work. While much of the work he does is not directly representative of such ideological violence, the histories of violence in the colonial and apartheid instances are never far from the surface. These include, for example, the investigation of displacement, slavery and forced migration that comprised his filmed performance at the South African Pavilion of the 2017 Venice Biennale, Passages. This work, from 2012, the year of his Master’s exhibition, chimes well with these themes, but 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.
James Sey
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