City street maps, with the printed information obscured by drawings and notes attached with small jaggedly torn pieces of buff tape, were among Moshekwa Langa’s earliest works. On these maps lists of handwritten names of friends, music stars, and places gave clues to the past and to an imagined future. Both diaristic and aspirational, maps are a key leitmotif in the artist’s oeuvre.
Born in 1975 in the small country town of Bakenberg, in what was then Lebowa, and educated in a Rudolf Steiner school, with its teaching philosophy of “the intellect is the domain of art,” Moshekwa Langa came to local fame early. His first solo show was held at the Market Theatre Gallery in Johannesburg in 1995, and in 1997 he left South Africa for the Netherlands to take up a scholarship at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. In the same year his work was chosen for the exhibition Graft at the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale. For that show he plotted a three-dimensional map on the gallery floor, a rich and mythical landscape suggested by reels of unraveled cotton skeins spread across the space, interrupted by small cars and bottles.
Entitled Temporal Distance (with criminal intent): You will find us in the best places (1997), this work was to be the first of several such mapped landscapes, installed in museums around the world. Langa regards these installations as part of a larger work constantly in progress to index and tell moments in his life story. Titled The Mountains of My Youth (A Novel), Langa sees his work as drawing on James Joyce in its sweeping and unwieldy narrative style.
Langa has also taken the idea of journey into a video form. In Home Movies: “Where do I begin?” (2001) Shirley Bassey’s languorously sung words “Where do I begin” are heard, endlessly repeated as the camera focuses on the feet of small-town South Africans shuffling slowly toward a bus. In this simple but affecting video, he alludes to the enormous patience of ordinary people.
In Langa’s wall maps, a continuing series, every inch of the picture plane is filled with what appear to be islands, land masses, deltas seen from an aerial perspective and annotated with lists of names, ideas, a world of never-never lands.
In his figurative paintings Langa has allowed the sketchily drawn figures of his early works to acquire a greater solidity, more gravitas, though works like The Man Who Cast No Shadows (2005) still retain the faux naïf freshness, the energy that might remind us of Jean Michel Basquiat.
The artist also works in photography, in 2008 capturing the young soccer players from the area where he was born. Constantly shifting his practice, Langa resists being stereotyped in relation to his personal biographical history, his nationality, his race, or his age.
The Last Sigh 2005
India ink, oil, acrylic, and pencil on paper
88.5 x 68.5 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town
Photographer: Mario Todeschini
© Moshekwa Langa
Untitled 2007
Mixed media on paper
140 x 100 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
Photographer: Michael Hall
© Moshekwa Langa
At the end of time 2007
Ballpoint pen, colored pencil, Chinese ink, collage, and iridescent acrylic on paper
106 x 76 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
Photographer: Mario Todeschini
© Moshekwa Langa
Deforestation 2007
Pencil, Chinese ink, acrylics, colored pencil, and transparent lacquer on paper
140 x 100 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
Photographer: Michael Hall
© Moshekwa Langa
The Man Who Cast No Shadows 2005
Mixed media on paper
156.5 x 116 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Taché-Levy Gallery
© Moshekwa Langa
Die straat loop dood 2007
Acrylic, iridescent acrylic, Chinese ink, watercolor, and transparent lacquer on paper
140 x 100 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
Photographer: Michael Hall
© Moshekwa Langa
Call of the Sirens 2008
Acrylic colored pencil, India ink, and
lacquer on paper
140 x 100 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and
Bernier-Eliades Gallery, Athens
Photographer: Boris Kirpotin
© Moshekwa Langa
Temporal Distance (with criminal intent) You will find us in the best places 1997
Mixed media installation on Graft,
the Iziko South African National
Gallery, Cape Town
Dimensions variable
Photographer unknown
© Moshekwa Langa