In this poetic commentary on Dathini Mzayiya’s video portrait of Miriam Makeba, Lindokuhle Nkosi inscribes moments of death, spiritual calling, sorrow and exile born by Makeba, during her singular and passionate life.
Read More
“I have always wanted to be both man and woman, to incorporate the strongest and richest parts of my mother and father within/into me – to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks.” Lindokuhle Nkosi looks at black feminism, and the coded language around Caster Semenya
Read More“People laugh when you fall on your ass. So what’s funny?” - Basquiat
Read MoreIn the seminal text by Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, he argues for learning and teaching as a way to draw closer to a more radical, empathetic humanity. Nolan Oswald Dennis argues for the same in his latest solo show, Options. Lindokuhle Nkosi and Nolan Oswald Denis discuss the function of the underground.
Read MoreIn a musical lecture at explores amahubo, sonic historian Mbuso Khoza and the African Heritage Ensemble marry art, history and research to explore the story of the British defeat at Isandlwana.
Read MoreWhat is there to say about this place?
Four times, maybe five, I nearly died and this is how I have come to measure my life here. The first time. The door swinging open. (The afternoons still hot and musty like breath. The evenings, a sharp, chilly inhale). The second time and the screams of metal against metal. The third time. The fourth. The fifth.
Read More
From Carrie Mae Weems Kitchen Table Series
You are sitting on the wingback; she’s lying on her side on a brown leather four-seater.
Or she is upright on the wingback and you are prostrate on the couch and when that man appears on the screen, you stifle and swallow a scream but it stays there in your throat like a threat. Like a boulder in your oesophagus or that thing that comes some nights, slinking into your bed to sit on your chest, to keep you paralysed.
Tonight you will tell her that the man on the screen was also the man on top of you. And that he forced you down and was also inside you, saying: “If this isn’t what you wanted, then why are you here?”
Read More
Smaller stones I sew them into the hems of things. In the inner seams of jackets, in the blue denim crotch of a pair of jeans. I stuff some rounder grey stones in the upturned hems of trousers, and they shift when I walk. They rub against each, a comforting grating sound, an ankle shaker. Some I press into the grooves under my brogues and sneakers and every time I walk I tap dance. I lift myself light in the air to tease gravity and feel the stones pull my back to the earth with a clap and a clack. The larger ones - I wash them in salt-water, coil them in thin wire and chicken mesh and attached them to strips of leather to wear around my neck, my wrists. When I tie my hair into a high whorled bun on the top of my head, I slip a single stone in the folds of braid and hair. I have a stone I slip under my tongue when my words threaten to escape.
Read More
Snapshots have always existed, for black people, as sites of struggle. Within the delineations of a photograph we find content and contestation. These light-paintings provide us with an opportunity to create counter-hegemonic images. To document. To construct a black aesthetic. Photos can give and take, expand understandings or shrink them. Photographs can devastate both the seer and the seen.
Read More
For those in coordination with the modalities of war and worship, who follow the fire and study incineration, it is not alarming at all that the Gods have begun to appear at their own places of worship.
They step off their gilded thrones; descending on billowy, sheep-skin clouds. They lowered themselves, ensconced in light, amongst blare and horn, and forlorn shrills and toots and booms. When they hid themselves in the blaring, repudiating their light for ours.
Read More
