REFLECTIONS, on Black girlhood
Haneem Christian
Ruth Motau
Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi
Motlhoki Nono
Lebogang Tlhako
curated by Danielle Bowler
Join us with our participating artists for the opening of Reflections, on Black girlhood at the Market Photo Gallery, with sounds from Nombuso Mathibela.
Market Photo Workshop | 138 Lilian Ngoyi St, Newtown
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Woven into this group exhibition are reflections on Black girlhood from five contemporary South African artists across multiple generations. Collectively they sing “a black girl’s song” (to cite Ntozake Shange), exploring themes of memory, biography, performance, the body, community, care and “being in public”, through creative practices of waywardness, play and (insistently) joy.
But
isn’t it funny?
That when they ask about black childhood,
all they are interested in is our pain,
as if the joy-parts were accidental
- Koleka Putuma, Black Joy
Working against the portrait as capture, or figurative representation as the sole definition of portraiture, the works in this show turn to the abstract, out-of-focus and absent, in their poetic, tender, embodied, and life-filled offerings. In the intimacy of building community and chosen family, of twinned sisterhood and home, they reverberate in their reflections, asking us how and who we see. As portals, they are portraits in perpetual motion: questioning, holding, seeing and reflecting Black girlhood in all its expansiveness.
Whether throwing light, giving serious consideration, as consequence or commentary, the meaning of ‘reflection’ is amplified here. These are images and imaginings of return, of seeking and seeing, of reflection as memory, re-collection and re-memory – of engaging the refracted mirror, whether person or object. Through sound, image, video and sculpture, the artists ask for our own reflections on Blackness and girlhood, as they present theirs.
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Reflections: On Black Girlhood draws its inspiration from ‘Sighting Black Girlhood’, a hybrid course, taught across the universities of Johannesburg and Pennsylvania, exploring what it means to sight, cite and site experiences of Black girlhood across South Africa, the USA and the Caribbean.
This exhibition was made possible through the collaborative support of the Center for Experimental Ethnography (CEE), University of Pennsylvania, and the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC), University of Johannesburg.
Learn more about the exhibition programme here