Lauren Shantall
To reach Heart of Darkness, one must embark on a symbolic journey into the bowels of the hulking 1820 Settlers Monument. There, one will confront an Africa of the past – that mythical place of the European imagination – and the multi-dimensional Africa of the present day.
Finally, one encounters the minds of two African artists, in this collaboration between the Paris-based Cameroonian artist Bili Bidjocka and South Africa’s self-proclaimed cultural provocateur, Kendell Geers.
Echoing through the corridors and flights of steps one must descend to reach the installation are the words “the horror, the horror” – those famous lines taken from Joseph Conrad’s novelistic exploration of imperialism. They have been distorted and amplified, forming a kind of guilt-ridden, laboured litany for the “darkness” or transgressive impulses in human nature. As one approaches the Gallery in the Round the sound intensifies, becoming increasingly menacing.
In the pitch black of the interior – an obvious choice perhaps – the heat is uncomfortable and the soundtrack distressing.
A single, bare bulb illuminates, from within, the translucent plastic of a myriad of oversized dress-like shapes suspended in the darkened ether. On closer inspection one may discern scripted binaries: “pride/humility”. And then: “pain/ pleasure”. And yet another: “I was wrong/I was right”. “Terrifying simplicity”.
This, it would appear, is Bidjocka’s contribution. The seemingly weightless, ethereal garments are faintly reminiscent of an earlier piece, Explicit Lyrics (1995), which also trades in illuminated words, or even of the camouflage dresses incorporated into work for the Sixth Havana Biennial. This represents a culmination, or simply an employment of the devices used in both, rather than recalling the garden of flowers that the artist installed at the Second Johannesburg Biennial in 1997.
On their own, these structures are evocative, subtly exploring the slippery, polluted notions of darkness and light – and what these terms may possibly, if ever, mean. Yet they rest, somewhat uneasily, in conjunction with television monitors scattered throughout.
There is a screened interplay of two visual texts: the one, the repeated climactic scene from the celluloid adaptation of the novel, the other a repetition of a similar climax in Apocalypse Now, which locates Conrad’s Africa in Vietnam. Two actors on different sets, their faces distorted in pain, mouthe the words “the horror, the horror”. The juxtaposed scenes, showing two different visual interpretations of the same literary text serve to drive home the fact that any “knowledge” about Africa is constructed with political intent. This, it seems, is the blessedly hype- free contribution from Geers.
The artists engage in a dialogue, but they speak less to each other than about an absent text and its broader cultural implications. The novel acts as a remote starting point for an exploration of what it means to work as an artist in an Africa beset by international trends, globalisation and the digital revolution. In the end, the artists tend to say more about individual intentions than a collaborative whole.