A conscientious attitude pervades Senzeni Marasela’s oeuvre. Her ‘Failing’ Series composed from blankets is a composite of theatre and theatricality for, in their dramatic charge, they discern an unfathomable political present. Precedingly, her ‘Waiting’ series threads a complex idea of the labour of, precisely that, waiting. In their incompleteness, the works speak to a multitude of apparent aporias that resemble modern South Africa and its lingering historical traumas. What then emerges from this latest exhibition, aptly titled ‘Two O’ Clock’, is a reflective moment that formulates itself as a necessary speech act. If there is one thing Marasela has always understood, it is the political necessity of speech-making, which for this provocative artist, is a labour that retains the power to narrate.
What thus animates Marasela’s new body of work through narration is a memory whose distinctness is unnerving: Two O’ Clock was the fixed time that indexed a sociological reality of Black life in Matatiele where Marasela’s, indeed “Theodora’s”, parents lived prior to migrating to Johannesburg. Two O’ Clock was the departure time of the last bus that would leave this village in the Eastern Cape, transporting people of different ambitions and wills to have livable political and economic lives. The nefarious dimension of this time is that it reveals the masked tyranny of colonial temporality that discerns in unique ways on Black body. If Theodora is the convoluted archetype that retraces her mother’s extensive, strenuous, search for her father who had left the Matatiele as a psychically devastated 17-year-old, on a Teba bus, at two o clock in 1956, it is because she understands that time possesses an inescapable cruelty whose relation to Black bodies is at once immediate, trans-regional, and historical. This is after all the leitmotif of twentieth century South Africa: an epoch defined by displacements, different forms of natal alienation, and political unbelonging.
‘Two O’ Clock’ is an attempt to materially register the symbolic weight of these issues. It is for this reason that itshali, the blanket that lives so prominently in this body of work, performs the iconographical labour of recoiling the heaviness of this fraught history. By contrast, it further seeks to reinscribe a sense of status to an otherwise structurally denigrated subjecthood. Its formal register is curious yet forthright: it is imposing, phallic, and yet still insists on de-masculinising the representation of a burdened modern history that has revealed itself to be androcentric in nature. Herein lies the other important assault of Marasela’s work; in composing this excavation, there is an insistence to bring her-story to the fore – an acknowledgement that our historical memory remains a fragile archive so long as it continues to render particular subjectivities as permanent minorities. Thus her-storical work is incomplete; Theodora, as at once a constituent and signifier of this work, is too incomplete. In ‘Two O’ Clock’, Marasela’s subversive stitching is a procedure that involves working through, rethinking, reassembling, and repairing a form of worlding that is constantly threatened by technologies of power and historical phenomena that shape our becoming.
Exhibition text: Dr Thabang Monoa
