SABELA UYABIZWA: Gladys Mgudlandlu & Kemang Wa Lehulere

Sabela Uyabizwa brings the work of Gladys Mgudlandlu into dialogue with new responses by Kemang Wa Lehulere, staging an intergenerational encounter between a pioneering South African modernist and one of the country’s most significant contemporary conceptual artists. The title, drawn from Nguni languages, may be understood as a summons: “respond, you are being called.” This call is historical, spiritual, formal and ethical. It asks what it means to listen across time, to answer an artist whose work was never fully received in its own moment, and to enter a relationship with the past that does not flatten, consume or resolve it.

Rather than presenting Mgudlandlu and Wa Lehulere through a simple model of influence or homage, the exhibition proposes a more charged relation of call-and-response. Mgudlandlu’s works, drawn from Wa Lehulere’s personal collection, appear as dense and compressed visual worlds: landscapes, birds, fields, skies and structures held together through rhythm, pattern, memory and atmosphere. Wa Lehulere’s responses do not explain or complete them. Instead, they open them outward, allowing their histories, silences and unresolved energies to reverberate in the present.

Viewers can expect an exhibition of intimate scale but considerable conceptual depth. The works invite close looking, but also a kind of listening: to surface, gesture, absence and echo. Across the exhibition, the encounter between the two artists becomes a meditation on inheritance, abstraction, Black artistic memory and the ethics of response. Sabela Uyabizwa asks how contemporary practice might answer the call of an earlier generation without claiming mastery over it. It is an exhibition about recognition, but also about restraint; about the debt owed to those who made imaginative freedom possible under profoundly unequal conditions; and about the continuing urgency of Mgudlandlu’s work within South African art history today.

Gladys Mgudlandlu occupies a singular and still under-examined place in South African art history. Born in the Eastern Cape and later based in Cape Town, she worked as a teacher and nurse while developing a deeply personal artistic practice outside many of the formal structures available to her white contemporaries. Her paintings and drawings drew on childhood memory, Xhosa and Fingo mural traditions, birds, rural and urban landscapes, and an imaginative aerial perspective that became one of the most distinctive features of her work. In a segregated art world that rarely granted Black women institutional seriousness, Mgudlandlu insisted on the authority of her own visual language.

Her historical significance lies not only in what she painted, but in the conditions under which she painted. Mgudlandlu was one of the first Black women artists in South Africa to exhibit publicly within the professional gallery system, including in white establishment galleries alongside far more privileged white peers. At a time when Black artists were often read through ethnographic, documentary or sociological frameworks, she claimed the right to make work that was lyrical, formally inventive and imaginatively self-directed. Her practice can therefore be understood as one of the earliest and most important assertions, by a woman artist of colour in South Africa, of art made for its own aesthetic, poetic and intellectual necessity.

This claim to “art for art’s sake” was not apolitical. Under apartheid, aesthetic freedom was itself a radical position. Mgudlandlu’s work resisted the narrow categories imposed upon Black artists: naïve, folk, outsider, decorative, intuitive. Instead, her paintings reveal a sophisticated engagement with abstraction, surface, rhythm, landscape and memory. She unsettled the boundaries between modernism and tradition, figuration and abstraction, cultural inheritance and formal experimentation.

Her contribution continues to matter because it expands the terms through which South African art can be understood. Mgudlandlu made possible a language of imaginative sovereignty that later generations continue to inherit. Contemporary South African artists, critics and curators remain indebted to her for the space she opened: a space in which Black women’s vision, formal intelligence and aesthetic autonomy could no longer be dismissed as marginal.

Kemang Wa Lehulere is one of the most important contemporary conceptual artists to emerge from South Africa. Born in Cape Town in 1984, his practice has been shaped by the afterlives of apartheid, the instability of historical memory, and the ways in which personal, collective and national histories are buried, redacted or misremembered. Working across drawing, sculpture, installation, performance, text, video and sound, Wa Lehulere has developed a language that is at once conceptually rigorous and emotionally charged. His work does not attempt to repair history by making it whole. Instead, it attends to what remains unresolved: silence, disappearance, repetition, mistranslation and the fragile traces left behind.

His formation is inseparable from collaborative and experimental practice. Wa Lehulere studied visual art in Cape Town before completing his BA Fine Art at the University of the Witwatersrand. In 2006, he co-founded Gugulective, an artist-led collective rooted in Gugulethu, and later became a founding member of the Centre for Historical Reenactments in Johannesburg. These contexts helped shape a practice that understands art as research, excavation, performance, conversation and counter-memory.

Wa Lehulere’s international career has been substantial. He has exhibited widely in major museums, biennials and institutions, and in 2017 was named Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year. His Deutsche Bank exhibition, Bird Song, took Gladys Mgudlandlu as a crucial point of departure, bringing her work and history into dialogue with his own investigations of erasure, pedagogy, Black cultural memory and the unfinished archive. His engagement with Mgudlandlu comes from a broader practice of returning to twentieth-century Black artists, writers and cultural figures whose contributions have been obscured or insufficiently understood.

His selection for the 2026 Venice Biennale, In Minor Keys, curated by the late Koyo Kouoh, marks a major recognition of his global relevance. The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia places Wa Lehulere within one of the most prestigious platforms in the international art world, affirming the seriousness with which his practice is regarded by museum directors, curators and cultural thinkers internationally. In Sabela Uyabizwa, that global significance returns to a deeply local and intimate encounter: Wa Lehulere answering Mgudlandlu’s call not by explaining her, but by allowing her work to continue speaking.

Sabela Uyabizwa (respond, you are being called) is a Nguni phrase with polysemous implications. In the first instance, it centres on the theological imperative to listen attentively to a divine summons, while in the other, the phrase represents the antiphonal practices common in African and African diasporic sociality, known as call-and-response. The call is anticipatory in form and, therefore, dialogical in nature. In other words, it’s always a call soliciting a reaction, and that response can only be meaningful if it realises its purpose. In call-and-response, listening is intentional and precedes, serving not only as “lending an ear” but also as an embodied process of submission, engaging the human sensorium at all its levels.

In Sabela Uyabizwa, the work of two South African artists, Gladys Mgudlandlu (1917-1979) and Kemang Wa Lehulere (b. 1984), follows the structure of the antiphonic relation, in which the latter is called to respond to the former. However, a response is not impersonation; each repetition bears its own marks. The Mgudlandu works included here come from Wa Lehulere’s personal collection, having previously been part of Mrs. Fuchs’ collection, a South African expatriate in Israel and the owner of Rodin Gallery. Elza Miles, Mgudlandlu’s leading biographer, states that the gallerist was responsible for launching the artist’s career with her debut exhibition at Rodin Gallery in 1962. The dialogue between these artists immediately invites us to reckon with the beckoning voice of Mgudlandlu’s visual economy over the years and to carefully explore how Wa Lehulere’s work with modernist artists has rightfully rubbed our scholarly curricula, including in art history, the wrong way. Most importantly, it helps us to further see the complexity in Mgudlandlu’s practice, a complexity that cannot but complicate the dialogue itself.

Thus, their “pairing” in this show is simply visual spillage: each of Wa Lehulere’s responses is paired with the work it interacts with. Through visual means, they engage in an intergenerational dialogue across two successive discursive periods: modernism and contemporary art, with one an ancestor and the other still practicing. Engaging in dialogue involves maintaining contact and connection, even across different temporalities in ways that make them contemporaneous. For Wa Lehulere, conversing with the dead isn’t an uncharted field; his work habitually exhumes the archival remains of the dead: Ernest Mancoba, Nat Nakasa, and Gladys Mgudlandlu among them. Consider his 2017 solo project, Bird Song, created for the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle award show, where he recovered an opaque fragment of a mural beneath layers of paint in Mgudlandlu’s home in Gugulethu. Whereas previously the aim was to recover and restore the artist’s house as an archeological and archival site, in these responses, Wa Lehulere shifts the focus from the aesthetics of retrieval to experimentation. His appreciation for fabulation, gaps, fissures, murmurs, and staccato in his approach to historical records has enabled him to avoid some of the pervasive trappings of the local scene, namely the turn toward decolonial thought as a vehicle for recuperating ethnic custom and “going native.”

But you might ask, “How do we listen to paintings, let alone engage in dialogue, when paintings are materially mute?” Reading the traffic of photographs in the African diaspora, black artists and scholars have long reflected on how they saw sounds or listened to images, arguing that the quiet in images not only registers sonically, but that its lower frequencies demand our focused attention. It might seem odd to insist on Mgudlandlu’s quiet registers, given the unassuming thematic ordinariness of what it explores. However, not only is there nothing ordinary about her ordinary scenes, but we might also need to reexamine what we have come to mean by both quiet and ordinary under the apartheid paradigm. As such, Wa Lehulere’s listening and response fall into traditional antiphonal practices called “deep-bone listening,” a form of listening that doesn’t alternate with, but is, if we think with Fred Moten, seeing. By maintaining the axiomatic posture of call-and-response in pictorial form, Wa Lehulere’s work simultaneously enters into dialogue with the visual properties of Mgudlandlu’s composition and also wrestles with the histories of the market’s primitivising logic that restrained the interpretation of her work.

As such, Mgudlandlu’s pioneering form in South African modernism remains underexplored. Over the years, studies have emphasised her idiosyncratic compositions, either captured from above or below eye level, her upbeat palette on densely vegetated rural plateaus, and dreary scenes of anthropomorphic township houses. Like many black South African modernists based in the city, she worked on small, easy-to-carry surfaces that reflected the spatial conditions of living in the township. Like Moses Tladi, Mgudlandlu’s landscapes have been and remain accused of being “uninhabited.” Upon close inspection, this absence of human presence does not always erase signs of habitation. Her recurring proclivity for wildlife and plant life – particularly avian species, which took spatial prominence– earned her the informal yet fitting nickname, Lady Bird. But how does her aesthetic drift toward texture and pattern, as an index of her early training in traditional mural art and in ukusinda– where botanical designs and motifs dominate – reinstate itself in her art? It is correct to surmise that the trace of this ornate simplicity had become part of, implicitly recovered in, and even hyperbolised by her language of deformity and exaggerated proportionality of forms.

Her overelaborate appropriation of traditional arts is evident in these shadowy, abstracted compositions, which resemble topographies of hand swirls, turns, and crossovers. These are monochromatic abstractions of close-up Koki-pen drawings on paper from the early 1960s that detail impenetrable labyrinths, whose careful, terse hatching lines trace the entwined, twirling, entangled, and rhythmic movement that look like forms of greenery, escapements, and the birds’ bodily structures. We’ve seen several of Mgudlandlu’s ink drawings before, many of which are in her signature figurative style and feature similar drawing techniques. However, they are not as compressed, nor do they restrict our access much or pose a threat to smother trespassers. Does the tenebrous intensity of these drawings have anything to do with her fondness for painting at night by candlelight? The compression of the picture plane and the tight cropping of detail disable breath, a phenomenological experience that her rendition of township houses equally captures. I’m drawn to their intricate detailing and modelling of these continuous panoramas of mark-making, to her consideration of ink impressions on the paper, and to how each composition enables her to achieve an abstracted effect. I’m also interested in the rationalist whim that seems to break with the presumed intuitive posture of her figurative expressionism.

The introduction of these experiments with abstract visual forms, which had hitherto been cast aside and overlooked in discussions of her work, scandalises the historiography of South African art. By cast aside, I am alluding to the fact that one would be hard-pressed to find Mgudlandlu’s name mentioned in studies of mid-century abstractions in South African art writing. Yet the images in this show date back to the beginning of her career, when the artist was experimenting with avant-garde forms, using materials such as oil, gouache, and felt-tip markers, which she also employed in her figurative works. With abstraction (in all its subsections) at its height in the 1960s to the 1970s, the overemphasis on figuration in her work had clearly come at the expense of her abstracted subjects for a reason. While I use the word abstraction to describe them, I am wary of both the limiting nature of “the language of absolutes,” as Meyer Schapiro describes the framing of traditional abstraction, and its inability to capture the essence of these works. 

In these pairings, Wa Lehulere’s drawing responses explode the compactness. It takes on a visual language of decompression, release, and dispersal; therefore, deconstructing and disassembling Mgudlandlu’s abstracted topologies. Where Mgudlandlu presents us with a shadowy topography of adulating meanderings, Wa Lehulere interrupts it with a striking sense of lightness, seemingly indicating that they are operating on two different temporal registers. However, whether in light or darkness, particles face the risk of disappearing. Wa Lehulere’s use of varied charcoal and ink markings, impressions, shapes, and techniques employ the white of the paper’s substrate as a space for the diffusion of density, of breathing. Where Mgudlandlu’s tightening and darkening of the pictorial space produced an abstract grammar that aptly described the climate of the 1960s, Wa Lehulere’s lightening of space and disintegration of inscription offers no greater optimism – on what grounds could it? Although these breaks are more pronounced, the artist leaves enough continuity –through recurring shapes and marks – to suggest dialogue and connection. In  Mophato (Cohort), he suggests connectivity by using retaining triangular shapes that resemble the birds’ beaks, whereas in Nocturnal Sentiments, the twirling mark-marking is disentangled. And while these are drawings in black and white, Wa Lehulere has brought-in an implicit presence of colour in how he’s decided to use Mgudlandlu’s palette around the frames of each work.

Sabela Uyabizwa is as much about dialogical relations that unfold in the process of call-and-response as it is about breath. I previously raised the issue of breath, a subject that has gained renewed attention in critical studies of Blackness, especially with recent movements like #BlackLivesMatter. This is what I have been trying to get to by relative descriptions of spatial distributions in these works. Space determines our ability to breathe, to retain our humanity and dignity. These works, in one way or another, help raise these questions through their dissimilar yet related abstract visual forms.

–Athi Mongezeleli Joja