Uhlala Phi

Notes

Weh Beyontse! Umuhle Yezwa! Awukulumi? Ukwatile? Ushadile? Ksks... Ke Dezemba Shambula! Vele Awufuni? These are examples of Johannesburg Words. Through oil pastel drawing these works show faces and headshots of creepy and sometimes handsome, charmer, cleva, benevolent, geriatric, nice and skelem gents wearing gold chains with their toxic verbal expressions linked or strung on them, reminding us all that misogynoir is a timeless fashion made insidious by how ubiquity lends it subtlety. In oil pastel drawings the text is backward flirting with the medium of printmaking of which the artist specialises in but also to urge men who could be looking at the work to look into themselves too through the mirror imaging. Mabusela plays with vernacular phonetics to bring into focus how the streets of Johannesburg become a school of cultures: familiar oral encounters with unfamiliar men bridging structures of power over winding roads intersecting at collective sites of vulnerability. These text based portraits not only call out the male gaze in the everyday but works to overturn the historical canon of women as muses and men as the artists.

Exhibited

Studio Nxumalo, Johannesburg, Footnotes, 4 to 31 March 2023.