Amsterdam

This Amsterdam summer, our gallery hosts an exhibition by Tumelo Mtimkhulu, titled I, one drop plus one drop makes a bigger drop, not two, drawn from his recent residency project at De Ateliers, with programming curated by the artist himself. The artist writes:

I, one drop plus one drop makes a bigger drop, not two, I attend to the reality that even before I knew of and read textual history, I already had an intimate relationship with it, its omitted constituents through my body and its sensorial apparatus. To borrow from Don Mee Choi, my tongue was already a 'site of power takeover'.

'One drop plus one drop makes a bigger drop, not two’ is a line uttered in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film entitled Nostalghia. For me, it speaks of the inability to truly discern that which is innate or personal from that which is shared and historical; how in their meeting in the body, they become a bigger drop.

Throughout the exhibition, my use of poetry abandons the book as the established material carrier. In Khafulela I explore labour, imported ideas of respectability and moral rectitude. The work is made up of four irons on which I etched a poem, and behind the irons there's a mirror that echoes the objects. Aperture (a poem in twelve parts) is an etching printed on plaster to convey the weight and materiality of the intangible quality of language.

Aperture (a poem in twelve parts) is alive with entanglements. In it I move from writing in response to the countenance of my mother as she ages, the intimacy of a home, being away and having to rely on language to bridge the distance; to reckoning with the failures of language. In-between I sit with the uneasiness of the wrinkles in the purported neutrality by former Empires.

Excerpts from part 7 and part 8 of Aperture:

I am away... This city...

The street lights line the lip of sidewalks.

A limbless lot, of cyclops that look with jaundice eyes.

In a darkness broken by unblinking windows.

 

I have known only of an ill-tailored night

Whose darkness is like a pall.

To which many are made to resign themselves and although our names be beautiful

Katlehong

Thokoza

Thembisa

Khayelitsha

Langa

...

'To which many are made to resign themselves', with an emphasis on the word made, speaks to the ideological superstructures that occasioned geographical dispossession. The making of townships as sites of extractable labour and how in the wake and aftermath of Apartheid, the people from which my I emerges still insist on the necessity for 'Life. Conviviality. Affect. Names. Love. Mourning. Plots against the state. Plans for living after.' (after Dionne Brand). This insistence is encapsulated in the entire poem and extends to the other works shown, all of which are typified by my return to language and its relationship to the representational world; because language is where worlds are made.

The selected works shown in this exhibition form part of a larger body of work made and first shown as part of the end of my residency at De Ateliers, with mediums ranging from installation and site-specific interventions to sound, sculpture and poetry. Many of the works are held in a tension of my being privy to how even some of the experiences thought to belong to the domain of the personal are impressed upon by the histories of imperial subjugation and colonialism.

Keep an eye on the website and our socials for public programming. A finissage will take place on 6 September. 

The space is open by appointment throughout July and August. Email noelle@stevenson.info or tumelomtklu@gmail.com to make an appointment.