For the two weeks of the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown the walls of the 1820 Settlers Monument — just as with every other vertical plane in the town — are so plastered with posters advertising theatre events and exhibitions of paintings, it’s sometimes hard to tell where the marketing ends and the actual exhibitions begin.
There is one exception in the middle of this: a pokey, dimly lit room at the back of the Monument precinct, empty for the most part and then crowded at one end by a group of faceless giants stitched into being from black rubber and satin ribbon. This is the first home of Nicholas Hlobo’s travelling exhibition after he was pronounced the 2009 Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art late last year.
Titled Umtshotsho, the exhibition takes its cue from the “Umtsho-tsho” socialisation rituals practised by Xhosa youth.
These rituals allow young men before the age of initiation and circumcision to practise aspects of adult sociability among themselves, including sexual relationships. This is a small gap in a forcefully heterosexual tradition in which homosexual identity is given some latitude.
This idea is the springboard, an autobiographical point of departure for the artist, to an artistic language that then works itself out more organically. It helps to know when visiting the show that Umtshotsho is about finding a place for marginal subjects — particularly gay men and women — within traditional Xhosa culture, but it isn’t necessary. Izithunzi and Kubomvu, the two sculptural installations that make up the exhibition, suggest their own narratives just as easily.
Izithunzi, the eight towering figures gathered in a circle in the room, are at some sort of party. The lights are out except for a few dim red bulbs. They seem to be waiting for something or for one another. One character slouches fatly into a wingback chair; another — the wallflower — has installed itself so permanently on a sofa at the back of the room that it’s become one with the upholstery.
An enchanting figure on the right wing lifts its heavy rubber skirt to reveal a cascade of brightly coloured satin ribbons hanging from the underside. It’s this gesture of revelation that makes one wonder who or what is under all the other rubber blankets.
Hlobo’s narrative sensibility, much stronger this time than in previous work, has been sadly underappreciated by festival audiences, who seem to prefer painted pictures and captions. The word on the street is that Umtshotsho is “weird”. But this probably reflects less on the exhibition itself — which is the worthiest follow-up on a Young Artist Award in years — than on the National Arts Festival’s glaringly limited visual arts programme.