The countries that Burundi-born artist Serge Alain Nitegeka has called home are easily more than your average African has visited. By the time he was in his early 20s, Nitegeka had lived in his native Burundi and its twin sister Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya and South Africa — his current home.
When Nitegeka was 11, civil war broke out in Burundi, forcing him and his family to leave the country of his birth for “Zaire”. I queried the use of the name Zaire but Nitegeka insisted: “I am saying Zaire because it’s a different country now. I always call it Zaire. I say Democratic Republic of Congo for different reasons.”
After brief sojourns in these countries, Nitegeka eventually arrived in South Africa “eight or nine years ago”. The minutiae of this peculiar journey, the varied textures of each individual country, he would not discuss.
“It’s a long story and I don’t wish to discuss the details. Some things I will say, some things I won’t, because they could lead me to a place I don’t want to remember. I have seen things I don’t want to remember,” he said.
Nitegeka’s art work titled — and walk in my shoes at this year’s National Arts Festival in Grahamstown gave one an idea of his strange journey. The work, an installation of trusses jutting out to form labyrinthine triangular shapes, could be interpreted as a sculptural meditation on the life of the migrant.
The crisscrossing dead wood, which made movement difficult, and the dark colour, which added to the gloom, could be viewed as a sharp geometry of exile. It alluded to the maze with which the refugee has to deal: corrupt cops, greasy-palmed public servants and a mostly indifferent bureaucracy. The installation made particular demands on the viewer: as one Ânegotiated the maze, one became a participant, a performer in Nitegeka’s maze.
Nitegeka, who is enrolled for a master of arts degree at the University of the Witwatersrand and completed his undergraduate studies at the same institution in 2009, is a commanding presence. He is 1.9m tall and when he walks into a room everyone takes notice. But it is not his hulking frame that has caught the attention of the arts community; rather, it is a recognition of his work. Last year Nitegeka won the Tollman Award for the Visual Arts as well as a Fondation JP Blachère Prize, which is awarded at the Dakar Biennale. Nitegeka was also the recipient of the 2008 Robert Hodgins Prize, a Wits University award.
His group exhibitions include Time’s Arrow at the Johannesburg Art Gallery and Beyond the Line at the Goethe-Institut in Johannesburg, both held last year, and Geography of Somewhere, held earlier this year at the Stevenson Gallery.
As a Burundian living in South Africa, a substantial part of Nitegeka’s work references his status as a migrant. He is fascinated by the place occupied by the non-South African — his underground position — and the difficulties he faces. His 2010 work, The Tunnel, a wooden tunnel in which planks impeded ease of movement, illustrated this. One could argue that this work was an attempt at making the viewer interact with his work and contemplate the hackneyed other.
It is difficult not to categorise some of his work as touched by nostalgia, however small. Indeed, Nitegeka told me he was “trying to understand the things that I have lost. When you move through the space, you lose something yet you pick up something. I picked up Swahili, which is not my mother tongue,” he said.
Although his formative years were spent constantly on the move, Nitegeka’s works do not simply reduce the migrant’s condition to maudlin angst or an uncritical self-referencing. There is recognition that migration is as old as humanity itself. The artist is acutely aware of what he described as a “global consciousness” of the phenomenon “yet aware of my context” — that is, the specific imprint of dislocation on him and his psyche.
His 2009 installation, The Human Cargo, bears this out. The work, self-portraits in charcoal on wooden crates, was an examination of displaced bodies using his own body. The verbally inventive could say the work was a spiritual cartography of his own exile. It is the body beautiful constrained and contained in what feels like a factory-like ambience.
Nitegeka does painting and charcoal drawings, sculptures and installations, but he is keen to be constantly evolving. “I [might be] doing this work and the gallery thinks I will continue with this kind of work. Next time I will come up with something different. My life hasn’t been stable; it’s always changing. One has to change, evolve for things to change, to stay fresh and interesting,” he said.
See the work of Serge Alain Nitegeka at this year’s FNB Jo’burg Art Fair at the Stevenson Gallery exhibition