JOBURG ART FAIR - FRINGE EVENT

For “Esikhaleni – Spatial Practices”, a fringe exhibition held as part of the Johannesburg Art Fair, Thom created two separate works. The first, a collaboration with young artist Lawrence Lemoaona and presented as part of Outlet, was entitled “Thom vs Lemoaona”, on surface a send up of both race and gender issues that mark the contemporary South African mindset. Two boxers, Thom and Lemoaona respectively, square up against each other: noses almost touching as they stare into each others eyes, then raising their gloves with fighting poses solemnly declaring their intentions to beat each other to a pulp. However, once the actual battle starts we see them riding each other like horses when one scores a knockdown, at other times simulating oral sex and scatological fetishes with raw meat: Lemoaona squats and ‘defecates’ on Thom’s face. One can only cringe when Thom, in turn, feeds a sausage to Lemoaona. Near the end of the video loop they fight a single piece of meat, tugging at it with their teeth like hungry animals until it tears in two. What begins as an olds school ‘match up’ soon turns into a twisted psycho-sexual rumination on the relationship between violence, submission, politics and sex that would please even Pasolini. The work was presented a two-channel video projection, splitting the projected image up on two hanging curtains with projections coming from opposite sides. In effect, this meant that one had to continuously circle the installation in order to clearly understand the piece, coming as it were, from ‘opposing sides’.

For the second work, entitled ‘Traffic’, Thom conceptualised a hard-hitting group performance, appropriating what is possibly one of the most infamous practices of community justice and punishment from the mid 1980s-1990s in South African history, namely ‘necklacing’. For a while now Thom has been appropriating iconographic images and objects associated with so called revolutionary practices and war – Molotov Cocktails, Ak47’s and even the shards of broken glass so often associated with violent public protests and riots. Now the tyre makes its appearance and once again, it becomes a physical burden that the artist ritually engages with. At first one is drawn closer by the iconic simplicity of both image and action: four figures dressed in red workers uniforms, each with a tyre around their neck rolling around on the gallery floor. It is as if they are all battling personal demons, heading of into their own direction and struggling with the physical weight and form of the tyre around their neck. But then the beautiful simplicity of the work is revealed: as the performers encounter obstacles along the way, including other performers, they simply change direction and continue rolling. Thus, in a movement that seems more aptly described as ‘the dance of death’ than an artwork, the performers continuously expand and retract into a single, chaotic whole. This is ballet of sorts, one that begins at home, in the history of our country, extending outward into the vast expanse of human experience, thought and physical movement. Whether it concerns philosophy, art, (im)migration, politics or even the forcible removal of people from their homes, the work touches a raw nerve exactly because it suggests the constant conflict between dialogue and monologue, the individual and the community, stasis and movement, that mark human history. As the Cameroonian artist Joel Mpah Dooh exclaimed on seeing the work: “Everyone keeps just keeps rolling, struggling with the tyre. And when they are tired they rest for a short while, only to begin again. This is mad!” Indeed.

Text by Mika le Roux.
Photography by Shane de Lange and Abrie Fourie.