Lindo Zwane and Sifiso Temba

Imiyalo Yabazali – Instructions from our Parents

16 December 2019 – close end of March 2020

Gallery South is pleased to announce Imiyalo Yabazali – Instructions from our Parents, a duo exhibition by Lindo Zwane and Sifiso Temba.

For this exhibition with the gallery, the artists – who share an inner-city Johannesburg studio and who, as mentees of David Koloane in 2016, were included previously in Koloane the Teacher: Post-Movements, Post-Memories – continue their critical collaborative practice and introduce new larger-scale works on canvas alongside mixed-media sculptures.

A culmination of their intense individual explorations into the construction of masculine identity, Imiyalo Yabazali explores Zwane’s and Temba’s personal, internal landscapes of memories, ancestral journeys and voices of parents that shaped their lives and work. They juxtapose the private and the public. Early historical and childhood memories are reworked through, across and into layers of contemporary religious, political, and social networks. The deep meaning for the artists of their ancestral visions and parental teachings combines to express this significance for contemporary viewers more broadly.

Continuing to grapple with the most pressing issues confronting his South African peers, unavoidably disillusioned and dispirited by the ongoing inequality, corruption and crime characterising post-apartheid society, Temba now evokes the ancestral beliefs and rituals learnt from his father who passed away recently. Exploring the powerful history, roots and lineage of his family background, Temba’s series, including ‘Ngonyama’ (the royal Lion, totem of the artist’s Temba clan) and ‘Iqhawe’ (the Warrior), assumes an unexpected spiritual direction, expressing his yearning for meaningful connection to the sacred and ancient teachings associated with his father.
In his multi-layered representations of memories and autobiographical figures, as a grown man Zwane nostalgically and candidly re-examines and explores his childhood. Juxtaposing boyish innocence with the adult knowledge of hardship, the artist reveals the hidden truths he realises should always have been apparent. In a single frame, the artist simultaneously conveys the playfulness of boyhood and a maturely cultivated understanding of what black women have historically endured to survive and raise thriving families. Raised into manhood by his mother and grandmother, in the absence of his father the only boy in a single-parent household, Zwane reinterprets ‘Black Tax’, transforming the relentless hole burnt in the pocket of his and his economically active black peers responsible for multiple other people into a celebratory account of the powerful intergenerational women in their lives. Celebrating his ability to be able to do for and give to his mother now what the apartheid system, the South African state and many black men previously have historically failed to do, Zwane produces moving and universal visual narratives.

Zwane and Temba are alumni of the Artist Proof Studio. Zwane received the Thami Mnyele Painting Merit Award in 2019. Temba has been among the top 100 award winners of the 2019 Thami Mnyele and the 2018 Absa L’Atelier art competitions.

The exhibition opens on Monday 16 December, 3 to 9pm.

The gallery is open throughout the season, including public holidays.