Moshekwa Langa
Ellipses
Ellipses accompanies Moshekwa Langa's first solo show with Stevenson. Using materials like masking tape, ink, spray paint and more, the works serve as a chronicle of the artist's life and continue his practice of documentation through abstract, figurative and text-based imagery. Langa's work since the mid-1990s has interrogated land and public and personal politics through the mapping of territory and cultural environments, on occasion using actual maps as a basis or 'word towers' charting the relationships, associations and intimacies with places and people that constitute his journeys in the world.
In an interview with Kabelo Malatsie in the catalogue, Langa speaks of his titles and processes:
Ellipses is only an explanation. Something broke in the description and I am finishing it and I am just leaving it here for the moment and I will open another topic because I am talking about many different things and I will come back to it. This is what Ellipses means to me right now.
What am I doing when I make work - do I sit down and plan, do I want to make landscapes, do I want to make things with wool, do I want to make things with threads, do I want to make things with toys? No, because my interest is sparked by so many different things that it is very, very possible to have more than 10 things at once because they are prompted by different desires and different needs. It is like taking notes, and so sometimes a medium takes over. I might be working with ink, and so the work might look like it is sequential, and sometimes within that there is a break because I get distracted - maybe it was sunny and then it started raining, and then suddenly, I do not know, something else happened, but all of those things were made by the same hands at different homes and in different set-ups ...
Published by Stevenson | Catalogue 86, April 2016
Softcover, 72 pages | Unavailable
