Notes

Ndzube’s work is characterised by his use of multiplicitous materials, artistic techniques, and stylistic choices – including painting, collage and assemblage – reflecting the equally multiplicitous and contentious socio-political landscape of South Africa. The performative stages and figures he assembles are created out of roadside construction site material and castoff clothing – thrown-away objects that the “nobility” of South Africa have discarded. His fantastical leaps of imagination and practicality mirror the techniques common to the bricoleur; like the figures in his carnivalesque processionals, he welds together both home-grown and borrowed aesthetic principles, philosophies, and cultural theories. Through these bricoleurs’ bodies, Ndzube reflects on the ways in which South Africans struggle to face the impact of colonial and apartheid history on their fragmented families and communities, and how they attempt to heal the woundedness of their present’.¹

1. M. Neelika Jayawardane (2016). Precarious Bricoleurs: Simphiwe Ndzube’s Becoming. Cape Town: WHATIFTHEWORLD. Page 2.

Exhibited

WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town, Simphiwe Ndzube: Becoming, 19 October 2016 to 26 November 2016.

Literature

M. Neelika Jayawardane (2016). Precarious Bricoleurs: Simphiwe
Ndzube’s Becoming. Cape Town: WHATIFTHEWORLD. Illustrated in colour on page 5.