MOSHEKWA LANGA

Moshekwa Langa was born in 1975 and featured at the latest Sao Paulo Biennial and the 2009 and 2003 Venice Biennials. He held solo-exhibitions at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva, the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, the Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Modern Art Oxford, and many others. Recently his work was included in exhibitions at the Museum Of Modern Art Oslo, The Studio Museum Harlem New York, Wiels Contemporary Art Centre Brussels, Mori Art Museum Tokyo, Kunsthalle Bern and the International Centre for Photography New York.

During Langa’s early successful forays into exhibition-making, foreigners often confronted him with rather conventional questions – questions that appeared to be prompted by clichéd or romanticized assumptions about the artist’s background as a black South African without formal artistic training. But then Langa pursued a two-year residency at the famous Rijksakademie For Visual Arts in Amsterdam. By now, he has exhibited his work all over the world and has spawned a considerable following in South Africa, the members of which mainly belong to a generation that came of age after the demise of apartheid. It is self-evident that Langa’s work is infused with issues like national identity, political participation and the construction of identity as such. But at the same time his artistic practice deftly avoids and subverts the stereotypical expectations that confront an artist working in the ‘postcolonial condition’.

Not confined to one particular medium, Langa’s work consists of gouaches, collages, photographs, expansive installations, and videos. They all reference the larger worlds of art, politics, and popular culture: just like Langa layers diverse materials, he piles up meanings and references that are often cryptic and ambivalent, yet resonant. With his drawings and gouaches, he demonstrates his definition of creativity as the freedom to make links, the freedom to connect heterogeneous elements. Using methods of abstract expression, free association and stream of consciousness, the artist allows work to be created, as it were. The viewing experience of Moshekwa Langa’s untranslatable visualisations is sensuous and seductive.

text by Philippe Pirotte