A few minutes into my conversation with photographer Lolo Veleko — the part where I ask her whether the whole identity thing is not overkill already — she reminds me that the Skunk Anansie song in the video installation accompanying her exhibition Scream! Mute! Scream! contains the lyric: “I caused a major war by just talking.”
People, she says, especially black people, do not want to talk about the prejudice they still harbour towards each other, so she will. “In high school, I was made to walk from the back to the front of the class all the time because ‘I didn’t walk like a black person’,” she says incredulously.
“I apparently walked like a white person. So it was these things that were happening throughout my childhood as I grew up, and not only to me, as I found out from talking to other people. They used to throw stones at a girl in Soweto because she was ‘not black enough’. She was too skinny to be black. Racism or tribalism among ourselves is still not dealt with.”
In Scream! Mute! Scream!, Veleko’s second solo exhibition in a short but blossoming career, she uses mostly portraiture, both of herself and of various subjects, to unpack issues of race, ethnicity, religion and, to a degree, sexuality. In constructing a multi-layered statement, she incorporates her older work, such as www.notblackenough.lolo, in which she used clothes to reframe her identity and that of her subjects. She also brings in parts of her striking stree-fashion portraits called Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder, which were famously exhibited in Snap Judgments — last year’s group exhibition of contemporary African photography, which showed at the International Centre of Photography in New York.
“When I started photography, my mission was to make sure that my history never gets wiped out again, visually,” says the Market Photography Workshop alumnus of the project that won her international acclaim. “When I approached people for street-fashion portraits, it was also about memory. I used to see those people, but I didn’t have the equipment. And now that I have the equipment, it’s like a second chance. I cannot not document it.”
Now, as before, clothes feature prominently in the artist’s arsenal. “When I looked through fashion books, and when I got a chance to have one, I think that was in late high school,” she recalls, “I kind of saw that fashion itself was playing with identity a lot and glorifies it. So it doesn’t make you feel bad to look Native American or Chinese or African. It plays with identity a lot, through different people.”
In the www.notblackenough.lolo project, she turned to fashion after she changed tack from her initial idea of documenting the stories of people of mixed parentage. When she saw how traumatised her probing left them, Veleko decided not to “exploit” her subjects by recounting their stories verbatim. She instead chose to reinterpret her findings through staged photographs accompanied by selected statements.
“So I did the fashion thing, and I dressed people up, and I knew I would do it as an installation so that the statements would become much stronger than the images of the people that are in that room. So I was just respecting the sensitivity that they had to how they were treated, even now in society.”
For the purposes of this exhibition, the project has been confined to a small partitioned room in which she vents the absurdities hurled at her, either at school, at the club or at work, using chalk inscriptions on black walls. These are offset by images of the artist and a few other subjects in defiant, vulnerable or disaffected poses. One particularly absurd image features Lulu, a black girl with Chinese features, “reading” a Chinese newspaper. The cross-processed picture gives her a pale blue pigment, leaving her darkened lips even darker by contrast. In effect, Lolo has “minstrelised” her subject to the point of being completely soulless, a tool for her to impose all sorts of imagined characteristics on. These are inscribed above her in chalk. Is she “Blackanese” (black and Chinese) because of her eyes, is the implicit question, before she is declared an “Oreo” (black on the outside, white within) in the adjacent picture in which she is dressed in a white shirt and tie. Elsewhere in the room, a black nude in crouching position is a subliminal, if not out of place, commentary on taboos in the black community.
The rest of the exhibition does not reach this level of intensity. It displays the playful, colourful yet shy side of Veleko, the shape-shifter extraordinaire who is at once acutely aware of her own powerful sexuality and yet reticent to reveal her peepers. She speaks of shying away from the public, but if her work is seen in the context of the performance that it really is, the whole timid act is part of the ploy.
Her self-portraits resonate because they show how Veleko has become an expert at crafting her own identity and commodifying it herself. This is after years of being on the receiving end of a prefabricated identity. Now she has the power to play both sides of the coin — and she is clearly enjoying it.
Sure, Veleko wants to provoke us and address cultural amnesia (but how weird is it really for a black girl to listen to rock, considering the genre’s history?). At the same time, though, she also knows the power of aesthetics. Just follow the red stickers at her exhibition and see which works have sold to get my point.
Let us not forget, after all, that the song playing over and over, audible throughout the gallery, is titled 100 Ways to be a Good Girl. “I know 100 ways to be a good girl, 100 ways, my willingness to please…”
Scream! Mute! Scream! runs at the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, until August 11. For more info Tel: 011 788 1113