Meleko Mokgosi: Your Trip to Africa

Meleko Mokgosi. Democratic Intution, Lerato: Philia I, 2016. Two panels: oil on canvas. 96 x 198 1/2 inches. © Meleko Mokgosi. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

By Ashley Knight

Botswana-born artist Meleko Mokgosi is presenting a series of newly commissioned works specifically created for Pérez Art Museum Miami’s 30-foot double height project gallery. Organized by René Morales, “Meleko Mokgosi: Your Trip to Africa” investigates themes of colonialism, nationalism and contemporary southern Africa. The project, on view through May 30, 2021, features a series of large-scale paintings that together function as a single, unified work.

Meleko Mokgosi employs traditions of Western European painting to deliver sharp political critiques relating to the postcolonial condition. By combining a high degree of painterly skill with a poetic, open-ended semiotic approach and an affinity for archival research, the artist shines light on some of the complex socioeconomic dynamics that animate today’s Africa.

Meleko Mokgosi. Democratic Intuition, Lerato: Philia II, 2016. Oil on canvas. 94 inches in diameter. © Meleko Mokgosi. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Mokgosi typically employs hyper-realistic figurative imagery on an epic scale, incorporating mysterious, unidentified personages loosely linked to one another in implied storylines, sometimes spanning multiple timeframes within the same composition. His work references murals and cinema as well as the conventional European artistic genre known as ‘history painting.’ Whereas traditional history paintings feature lofty subjects-military battles or climactic scenes drawn from ancient legends-Mokgosi elevates everyday, anonymous persons and common objects, setting them against mundane domestic contexts while inserting references that establish an array of subtle yet powerful suggestive effects.

Meleko Mokgosi. Democratic Intuition, Lex I, 2016. Oil and pigment transfer on canvas. 102 x 2018 inches. © Meleko Mokgosi. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

“This exhibition engages PAMM’s long-abiding interest in the Afro-Atlantic world that interweaves Europe, Africa, the U.S., Latin America and the Caribbean,” said Morales, PAMM’s Interim Director of Curatorial Affairs. “It draws from Miami’s deep identification as the crossroads of the Americas while signaling the museum’s dedication to addressing issues of racial, ethnic, and national identity with an eye toward diversity and transnational and cross-cultural interconnection.”

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Mokgosi’s exhibition at PAMM centers around the 1966 film Unsere Afrikareise (Our Trip to Africa) by the seminal filmmaker Peter Kubelka, who is widely recognized as one of the progenitors of the Structural film movement. The film follows a wealthy Austrian family on their safari trip through Africa, revealing the differences in social and economic status between the two cultures. As the Europeans engage in various leisure activities (swimming, sunbathing, teasing their native attendants, and, of course, hunting), the action is intercut with fleeting glimpses of African passersby engaged in their daily labor (carrying water, pounding a mortar with a pestle). Kubelka punctuates these sequences with the repetitive, gruesome spectacle of the Austrians killing and skinning an elephant, a zebra, a lion, a giraffe, and other wild animals.

Meleko Mokgosi. Acts of Resistance III, 2018. Oil on canvas. 86 x 56 1/4 x 1 1/2 inches. © Meleko Mokgosi. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

The disconcerting dimensions of Unsere Africareise have often been cited, together with Kubelka’s stated disgust with his bourgeois patrons, to support the argument that he meant the work to serve as a critique of European colonialism and tourism in Africa. Mokgosi takes a more critical perspective, however, citing Kubelka’s insistence that his true intention was to “try and tear the emotions loose from the people, so that they would gain distance to their emotions, their feelings.” Taking Kubelka at his word, Mokgosi infuses the film with a new emotional force, reversing the desensitized tone that often accompanies modernist aesthetic treatments of non-Western subjects. As he has often done before, Mokgosi drives this critique through the heart of the Western art historical canon.

Meleko Mokgosi. Democratic Intuition, Comrades: Addendum, 2017. Two panels: silkscreen, pigment transfer, acrylic, and oil on canvas. 108 x 154 overall. © Meleko Mokgosi. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Meleko Mokgosi (b. 1981, Francistown, Botswana; lives in New York) is an assistant professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. Mokgosi completed the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and received a BA from Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 2007. He received an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in 2011. Solo exhibitions of his work have been presented at the Fowler Museum at UCLA; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown; Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; New Wight Gallery, UCLA; National Library of Cameroon, Yaounde; Whitney Museum of American Art; National Gallery, Gaborone, Botswana; and the Augusta Savage Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His work is included in the collections of The Studio Museum in Harlem; Hammer Museum; Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida; Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; and Pérez Art Museum Miami, among other institutions.

“Meleko Mokgosi: Your Trip to Africa” is on view at Pérez Art Museum Miami through May 30, 2021. 1103 Biscayne Blvd., Miami, FL 33132.

Access to images of the exhibition at https://www.pamm.org/exhibitions/meleko-mokgosi-your-trip-africa

Visit PAMM’s Digital Museum to access virtual tours, https://pamm.org/digital-museum

Ashley Knight is an arts writer based in Miami.