Kemang Wa Lehulere

Another Cosmic Interluded Orbit, 2016,?Chalk on black board, 590 x 1,070 cm, Courtesy of the artist and Stevenson Gallery, Commissioned by SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul 2016

, 2016

Another Cosmic Interluded Orbit is a chalk drawing on a blackboard completed over 8 days by Kemang Wa Lehulere. The artist has mainly created works that look back on South African history from a post-apartheid context. His works are positioned between personal narratives and collective history, and between the processes of amnesia and archiving. The use of chalk, which can be easily used to draw and erase, and to redraw countless times over, signifies history, which is written, corrected, and endlessly revised. He states that the future exists within the past and the present and the inverse is also true.

“With my work it wasn’t overtly political but I was engaging with the struggle of trying to deal with the historical in that socio- political context and how does one navigate it. And for me the choice of chalk is an impermanent material because it’s about time and transition as well . . . things are always changing and moving and our perspective of the past is always shifting depending on where we are, how much we’ve moved or how much we haven’t moved at all.” (Kemang Wa Lehulere)

Kemang Wa Lehulere

b. 1984. Lives and works in Cape Town.
Wa Lehulere has a BA Fine Arts degree from the University of the Witwatersrand. Solo exhibitions have taken place at Gasworks, London, 2015; Lombard Freid Projects, New York, 2013; the Goethe-Institut, Johannesburg, 2011; and the Association of Visual Arts, Cape Town, 2009; in addition to Stevenson gallery, Cape Town and Johannesburg. Notable group exhibitions include African Odysseys, Le Brass Cultural Centre of Forest, 2015; Berlin Biennale, 2014; Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 2014; New Museum Triennal: The Ungovernables, New York, 2012; Lyon Biennale: A Terrible Beauty is Born, Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon, 2011; and When Your Lips Are My Ears, Our Bodies Become Radios, Kunsthalle Bern; Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, 2010. 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 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. He is Deutsche Bank’s ‘Artist of the Year’ 2017. Wa Lehulere was a co-founder of the Gugulective, 2006, an artist-led collective based in Cape Town, and a founding member of the Center for Historical Reenactments in Johannesburg.?