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| Meleko Mokgosi, Pax Kaffraria: Ruse of Disavowal, 2013 Installation view at the Lyon Biennale, France. Image via honorfraser.com. |
Pax
Kaffraria
April 19 – May 31, 2014
Opening reception: Saturday, April 19, 2014,
6:00pm to 9:00pm
2622 South
La Cienega Boulevard
Los
Angeles, CA
From
honorfraser.com:
For his
debut solo exhibition at Honor Fraser Gallery, Meleko Mokgosi will present the
final chapters of his three-year long history painting project Pax
Kaffraria. The exhibition will also include a series of charcoal drawings
of iconic breeds of southern African dogs and text-based paintings
interrogating recent exhibitions of African Art and imagery of Africa.
This culminating exhibition of Mokgosi's Pax Kaffraria follows
exhibitions of the earlier chapters of his project at the Studio Museum in
Harlem, NY, the Hammer Museum for Made in L.A. 2012, and most recently Pax
Kaffraria: Terra Pericolosa at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts,
San Francisco, and Pax Kaffraria: The Ruse of Disavowal at the
2013 Biennale de Lyon.The Ruse of Disavowal and new chapters Graase-Mans, Fully
Belly, and Lekgowa will be included in the exhibition
here.
Pax Kaffraria as a whole articulates the incommensurable aspects of
the post-colonial condition through strategic structuring of moments and
fragments that exceed traditional structures of authority and representation.
These unmoored narrative pulses are local and particular, a counterpoint to the
metanarratives of nationalism. Pax Kaffraria: Graase-Mans parses
the legacy of the Western European frontiersmen who established new colonial
states across southern Africa in the 1830s. Domestic scenes reveal colonial
dynamics at their core. In Pax Kaffraria: Fully Belly, we see the
coronation of a chief with contemporary and "traditional" elements
diachronically combined in the anointment of authority. This work, which
explores the economic and political legacies of neopatrimonialism across
Africa, touches upon the connections between governmental authority, customary
law, localized politics, and the military, and the effects of privatization on
all of these institutions.
Mokgosi's charcoal renderings of distinctly southern African breeds of dogs
tease out the political, emotional, and economic aspects of the legacies of
colonialism. Appearing throughout the Pax Kaffraria project, these
dogs show how domesticated animals occupy an important role within the purview
of human history and the struggle of southern African nationalisms in
particular. With his text-based paintings, Mokgosi addresses the problematic
re-inscription of colonial discourses by using museum labels as source
material. He makes critical interventions in the didactics that structure the
way the public understands works of art, systematically deconstructing the
power dynamics and cultural biases that underpin these presumably neutral,
educational texts. Mokgosi's commentary on these labels is at times personal,
emotional, analytical and poetic and inserts an individual voice to counter
these institutional constructions of history. Mokgosi interrogates the
implications of established histories and the narrative as a concept, playing with
notions of time and normative models for the inscription and transmission of
history, ultimately disrupting traditional Euroethnic notions of
representation. Mokgosi offers different ways of understanding
representation—epistemological, ideological, symbolic—undercutting traditional
structures to posit alternate modes for the creation of knowledge through
language.
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