Moshekwa Langa

Author: Elizabeth Janus, Hamza Walker
Publisher: Renaissance Society
Year: 2002
Pages: 100
ISBN: 978-0941548458

This publication documents Langa's 1999 installations at The Renaissance Society and Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva. Langa, a native of South Africa currently residing in Amsterdam, works in no single medium; video, photography, drawing, painting and found-object installations are employed without hierarchy, his medium choices being more a matter of whatever is immediately at hand. His exhibitions evidence not only this freewheeling versatility, but also the artist's prolifigacy; he fills every available inch in the gallery spaces.

This book's innovative design echoes the artist's collage aesthetic and spirit of generous excess. Like Langa's exhibitions, it is a visual candy store, so full of pleasures that it is hard to decide where to look first. In his catalogue essay, Walker interprets Langa's promiscuous mixing of media and his strategies of appropriation and fragmentation as a response to the conditions of belonging to a diaspora, reflecting the instability that comes from a radical change of place. Janus discusses Langa's efforts to come to terms with the established art world's expectation that an African artist deal with such political issues as post-colonialism, displacement and racism, and his resistance to that through the intensely personal and intimate character of his work.