Zenandi
Lindokuhle Sobekwa
Artwork 2021
Lindokuhle Sobekwa's photograph 'Zenandi' shows a child sitting on an outcropping of rock on a grassy hill.
Artwork: Lindokuhle Sobekwa, Zenandi (2021). Archival pigment ink on Photo Rag. 49.32 x 63.16 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Artist Lindokuhle Sobekwa Title Zenandi Date 2021 Materials Archival pigment ink on Photo Rag Dimensions 49.32 x 63.16 cm Credit Courtesy of the artist

From Ezilalini (The country), 2018–ongoing.

This photograph was included in Tell It to the Mountains, an exhibition by Lindokuhle Sobekwa and Mikhael Subotzky. During his residency at A4 in the year preceding the exhibition, Sobekwa restaged discrete images from his photographic archive, extending his reflections on fragmentation and estrangement to formal strategies of display and storytelling. The resulting ‘umngqameko’ or ‘horizon line’ offered both a compositional device and an opportunity to trace the artist’s thematic preoccupations across time and place, particularly those of belonging and ‘unbelonging’ as transcribed in the landscape. Since developing this strategy at A4, Sobekwa has continued to plot his horizon line across multiple installations, including his solo presentation at Huis Marseille in 2022.

b.1995, Katlehong

Installation photograph from the ‘Tell it to the Mountains’ exhibition in A4’s Gallery. On the left, Lindokuhle Sobekwa’s photographs ‘Amakhwenkwe’ and ‘Tsojana bus stop’ are mounted on the wall. In the middle, Sobekwa’s paper and photo collage ‘Mthimkhulu II’ is pasted onto the wall. On the right, Sobekwa’s photographs ‘Bhayi alembathwa lembathwa ngabalaziyo’, ‘Veld fire’ and ‘Zenandi’ are mounted on the wall.
Somebody, nobody, no body
Lucienne Bestall

The present and implied figure in A4's inventory of artworks. – January 24, 2025

Path page
Somebody, nobody, no body
Lucienne Bestall
The present and implied figure in A4’s inventory of artworks. – January 24, 2025
Path page

A place to start: with personhood, with the most direct impression.

Indexical in medium, the figure named, their likeness legible.
David Goldblatt's black-and-white photograph 'Ephraim Zulu watering his garden, 179 Central Western Jabavu, Soweto. September' shows a man seated on a chair in a yard, holding a hosepipe. In the background is a dog and a woman.
Lindokuhle Sobekwa's photograph 'Zenandi' shows a child sitting on an outcropping of rock on a grassy hill.

A more oblique example of the same mode –
Artwork photograph that shows George Hallett’s framed monochrome photographic diptych ‘Peter Clarke’s Tongue’, from the Customs exhibition in A4’s Gallery, mounted on a white wall.

Another at the edge of effacement –
Artwork photograph that shows Dor Guez’s photographic print ‘Samira’ from the Customs exhibition in A4’s Gallery.

Then:

A less direct form, but still a resemblance. The sitters named, resolutely themselves. (Arranged in degrees of clarity: Dora Sowden, Terrence and Mom).

Things begin to slip.

Here, a name and the word 'portrait'. Portrait of Julia. But no likeness to speak of. Instead – gestures, thickness, muddy opacity.

Named again, an image of a historical figure denied by a child's eclipsing crayon.

There are others without overture to personhood, similarly obscured (struck through by whiteness or hidden beneath spreading blackness).

Still another, rendered faceless by fire.

Even the photographed figure at times resists the medium's ambitions to precisely transcribe their likeness, becoming ghostly and indistinct, given without name.

Or appearing as a portrait of absence –
Sabelo Mlangeni’s ‘Absence of Identities’, a black and white photograph that depicts the shadowed faces of a bride and groom.

There are then those figures that remain hidden, are disguised beneath cloth or bound in hazard tape. All betray the individual (or deity) beneath – in title or image.
A photograph of Christo's collotype print and collage 'Wrapped monument to Leonardo, Project for the Piazza Della Scala, Milan'.

Others are wholly absent, recalled in only the empty vessels of clothing: hats without heads, sleeves without limbs. Where some remember named individuals, others evoke anonymous figures.
Jo Ractliffe's monochrome photograph print 'Roadside stall on the way to Viana, from the series 'Terreno Ocupado'.
An installation photograph of Haroon Gunn-Salie and James Mathews' installation 'Amongst Men' shows casts of kufiyas suspended from the ceiling.
A photograph of Kevin Beasley's untitled resin, garment and umbrella sculpture standing on a concrete floor.

Present in degrees of likeness, or hidden, erased, obscured and absent – the body that is somebody and the body that is no body. There are others.
Header
Close
Text