Kemang Wa Lehulere; South African 1984-; Late Punishment ,2023
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Notes : Working in a variety of media that includes sculpture, installation, drawing and performance, Cape Town based artist Kemang Wa Lehulere uses found objects and salvaged materials to create environments and events that situate personal memories within, and in contrast to, collective narratives. Using conceptually loaded materials such as school desks, tyres, chalkboards and ornamental ceramic dogs, he poeticises the 'double lives' of objects to tease out their ambivalent or subversive meanings through reconfiguration and assemblage. Currently represented
by blank projects, Wa Lehulere has seen international success with solo exhibitions at Göteborg Konsthall, Sweden; Manchester International Festival, the Tate Modern, and Gasworks UK; Pasquart Art Centre, Switzerland; MAXXI, Italy; the Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle, Germany; and the Art Institute of Chicago, USA. Wa Lehulere was the winner of the inaugural Spier Contemporary Award in 2007, the MTN New Contemporaries Award in 2010, and the Tollman Award for the Visual Arts in 2012; he was one of two young artists awarded the 15th Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel in 2013, won the first International Tiberius Art Award Dresden in 2014 and was the Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Arts in 2015.
The artwork Late Punishment forms part of a body of work Wa Lehulere refers to as monuments of the mundane, an extension of a sculptural series that began in 2018. The casted hands, depicting abstracted forms of the sign language alphabet, together with the broken wood symbolise the fracturing of old knowledge systems; and the reordering of South African education institutions through decolonial forms of knowledge and knowledge systems - a symbolic remake of cultural and spiritual identity. Here, these sculptural forms resemble maquettes of alternative education to replace apartheid monuments throughout South Africa.
In late 2019 Wa Lehulere inaugurated Zeitz MOCAA's Atelier programme with his residency project, Laying Bare. Now in its fifth iteration, the Atelier is a unique artist in-resident platform for Cape Town-based practitioners, offering an open studio in the museum's galleries.
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