Tracy Murinik On show in Cape Town
Just in case you overlooked him, I can report that Caliban is, indeed, alive and well, and effectively leaving many a little speechless and thunderstruck in his eloquent wake. Mustafa Maluka’s latest solo exhibition in the Artsstrip at the AVA, entitled (the (UNSTOPPABLE) rapist), engages, through an elaborate play of words and marks, with what has previously been written or uttered, or conveniently omitted in a witbroer’s version of history.
And, he knows how to spell out some variations v-e-r-y clearly. My slight irritation on first encountering the work, however, got me thinking, ”I’ve seen and heard this before”, was short-lived; not necessarily because the themes and revelations are new, and despite an occasional tendency on Maluka’s part to play the victim.
But Maluka does manage to go beyond the staid and predictable. His insights are sharp and incisive; his commentaries astute and knowing. He draws, cunningly, from an array of visual and literary codes, from the discourses of slavery and Black Consciousness, to hip-hop, and graffiti.
What results is a deliberate hybridisation and internal cross- referencing among the works. It is into this frame of reference that Maluka presents himself in a self- portrait called Hue-man, midway in the exhibition.
Ingeniously, Maluka invokes an uncomfortably familiar visual formula of crude racial stereotyping as the basis for his own face. This self- conscious manipulation of visually coded language manages to achieve an ironic tension into which the contradictory codes implode upon one another. The ambush is elegant and shrewd, delicately ensnaring any unsuspecting naivete. As the (unstoppable) rapist, Maluka’s ”rape” is a conscious pillage of language, and of ideas. It explores the ”mental rape” induced by oppressive ideological systems which demean individuals.
In this regard, Maluka also plays the role of therapist: he offers affirmation and demands the right of the slave to question his history and ultimately to rename and refigure the possibilities of his own being. The shift in consciousness is one from passivity and debilitation to action and reclamation. It is the move from Stolen Man, to its more critical counterpart, hung below it, They Stole the Man, which has as proof of its offence, a gaping space patched over with black-painted canvas; or from Once Upon a Crime (”they took away my afro-comb”) to Black Owned, Black Operated Afro Comb, shaped into a crown on the head of a dubious and crudely drawn black subject.
Maluka identifies, in this affirmative voyage, inspirational icons in the forms of Mandela – who dons his boxing gear and a defensive-looking robotic arm, subtitled, Can’t Stop the prophet: battle scars from fighting ignorance – and Biko wearing a halo.
He also proposes Knowledge, Power, Respect as being on a par with the basic human needs of electricity, water and bread. Again exploiting stereotypical representations, Maluka provides a decisive voice of warning for the subject to tout. ”I do not represent truth,” he proclaims. ”Don’t believe who I am: I am a political and commercial creation.” So, if your name happens to be Prospero, best you shape up or ship out.