Mohau Modisakeng for HRW
Mohau Modisakeng - Endabeni - 2015 - Size 200 x 150 cm - Edition #1 of 6 - Courtesy of Mohau Modisakeng and WHATIFTHEWORLD - Gallery price 9.7000 USD
Mohau Modisakeng
- In what way is ART a tool for activism?
In the South African context, where the long legacy of the systematic erosion of the personal and collective liberties of black people through colonial domination and erasure, race continues to play a central role in determining social, political, and cultural identities. Art has the ability to question and disrupt the status quo. In that sense, it can be one of the few tools that a degraded people can begin to gain a sense of themselves in the work that is produced outside of the racial tropes of coloniality.
- In what way does your chosen piece for HRW reflect 2020?
My work refers to the history of contagion, discrimination, and racial segregation. In 1901 the Cape experienced an outbreak of the bubonic plague. IN response the civil authorities established an isolation camp and hospital in a place called Endabeni in Cape Town. This isolation camp quickly mushroomed into an informal settlement where black people were relocated, thus beginning a long history of racial segregation through prejudiced spatial planning. 2020 begged the question of what would happen in the impoverished, over-populated black townships in a time of contagion and distress.
- What gives you hope?
My family, friends, and loved ones...and their drive to pursue a freer life in a place that is built against their ambitions. I gain strength from the small gains that people continue to make even under impossible conditions.
BIO
Mohau Modisakeng uses his body to explore the influence of South Africa’s violent history on how we understand our cultural, political, and social roles as human beings. Represented through film, large-scale photographic prints, installations, and performance, Modisakeng’s work responds to the history of the black body within the (South) African context, which is inseparably intertwined with the violence of the Apartheid era and the early 1990s. His images are not direct representations of violence, but powerful yet poetic invocations where the body is transformed into a poignant marker of collective memory.
Mohau Modisakeng was born in Soweto in 1986 and lives and works between Johannesburg and Cape Town. He completed his undergraduate degree at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town in 2009 and worked towards his Master’s degree at the same institution. Modisakeng recently performed at the Sharjah Biennale 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber in 2019. His work has also been exhibited at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town (2017); PERFORMA17, New York (2017); Tyburn Gallery, London (2016); IZIKO South African National Gallery, Cape Town (2014); Saatchi Gallery, London (2012); and the Dak’Art Biennale, Dakar (2012). Public Collections include the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago and Museum + Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), Pizzuti Collection Ohio, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, IZIKO South African National Gallery, Saatchi Gallery, the From Cobra to Contemporary Collection, EKARD Collection, Dommering collection, and Zeitz MOCAA.
Modisakeng has been awarded the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art in 2016. As part of a two-person exhibition, Modisakeng also represented South Africa at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017.