《非凡现实主义》艺术家｜莫哈乌·莫迪萨肯 Mohau Modisakeng

《非凡现实主义》展览现场，2024??Fotografiska影像艺术中心

开创性当代非洲影像艺术展《非凡现实主义》是亚洲首次也是规模最大的非洲摄影展。《非凡现实主义》聚焦撒哈拉以南的非洲国家，采取跨国视角，展出知名与新兴艺术家的摄影和影像作品。通过这些作品，艺术家设想了当代非洲文化特征作为一种持续可能性的状态，在这种状态中，神话、记忆和运动交织成一幅丰富多彩的想象艺术画卷。参展艺术家的作品将非洲描绘为一种天然包容世界的状态,这与哲学家阿奇勒·姆本贝对非洲大陆的描述相似,即"一个由重叠的血统、多种的交集应运而生形成的运动躯体"。

展览即将于12月1日闭展，最后两天，一起来探索超越传统印象的非洲世界。

在本篇中，我们将介绍参展艺术家之一，莫哈乌·莫迪萨肯，他的作品利用材料、隐喻和黑人身体来探讨南非的暴力历史对我们的影响。接下来，我们将带大家了解他的创作历程及理念，以及作品背后那些引人深思的故事。

莫哈乌·莫迪萨肯

Mohau Modisakeng

生于1986年，生活工作于约翰内斯堡和开普敦。

Born in 1986 ; Lives and works between Johannesburg and Cape Town.

|种族隔离的创伤与受压抑者的回归

The Traumas of Apartheid and the Return of the Repressed

莫哈乌·莫迪萨肯出生并成长于索韦托，当时正值动荡的政治过渡时期。在这里，莫迪萨肯目睹了极端暴力和贫困，这也正是他作品的灵感来源。他的作品涉及种族问题、社会军事化以及后种族隔离南非和后殖民大陆的深刻分裂。他质疑那些塑造我们对世界的经验的集体叙事，尤其是那些将黑人身体呈现为碎片化与扭曲的场域的叙事。莫迪萨肯解释说：“对我来说，真正的工作是将抽象的视觉符号和象征——无论是在音乐中还是在我的梦中——与集体社会经验产生共鸣的叙事联系起来。”

Modisakeng was born and raised in Soweto during a period of turbulent political transition. It was here that Modisakeng paid witness to the extreme violence and poverty that informs his work. His work engages race, the militarisation of society and the deep divides of post-apartheid South Africa and the post-colonial continent. He interrogates the collective narratives that inform our experience of the world, in particular those that evoke the black body as a site of fragmentation and distortion. Modisakeng explains: “The real work for me is in relating the visual signs and symbols of the abstract – be it in music or in my dreams – into a narrative that resonates with the collective social experience.”

南非是一个充满希望、遗产和苦难的国家，这些苦难源自殖民主义、奴隶制和种族隔离制度的压迫遗留问题，至今仍然困扰着南非的土地以及黑人和棕色人种的身体。普遍的贫困和未能纠正的不公平现象造成了一种焦虑、动荡和冲突盛行的环境。南非艺术家在突出南非争取解放、种族平等以及国家向宪政民主过渡的斗争中发挥了重要作用。这些艺术作品通常带有政治色彩，或纪念或挑战这片土地上沉积的历史。

South Africa is a country characterized by hope, heritage and hardships stemming from the oppressive legacies of colonialism, slavery and the apartheid regime that continues to plague the landscapes and Black and Brown bodies of South African citizens. Widespread poverty and the failure to redress the injustices of the past have contributed to an environment in which anxiety, unrest and conflict predominate. South African artists have played a significant role in highlighting South Africa’s struggle for liberation, racial equality and the country’s transition to a constitutional democracy. These works of art are often tinged with the political, commemorating or challenging the histories laden in the land.

Qhatha,2011??Mohau Modisakeng

莫哈乌·莫迪萨肯利用材料、隐喻和黑人身体来探讨南非的暴力历史对我们的影响，这段历史在当今社会被忽视了，我们如何理解我们作为人类在后殖民非洲，特别是种族隔离后的南非的文化、政治和社会角色。最初接受雕塑训练，莫迪萨肯的作品以电影、大型摄影版画、装置和表演为表现形式，动人、有力且富有诗意。“作品一开始并不试图描绘暴力，但却变得令人着迷，因为尽管我们可能会将历史视为我们的过去，但身体却对社会变迁无动于衷，因此它会铭记于心。”

Material, metaphor and the black body are the tools that Mohau Modisakeng uses to explore the influence of South Africa’s violent history that has been ignored in today’s society, on how we understand our cultural, political, and social roles as human beings in post-colonial Africa and in particular post-apartheid South Africa. Originally trained in sculpture and represented through film, large-scale photographic prints, installations and performances, Mohau Modisakeng’s artworks are moving, powerful and poetic. His “work doesn’t start off with an attempt to portray violence but it becomes mesmerising because although we might recognise history as our past, the body is indifferent to social changes, so it remembers.”

|物质、隐喻与黑人的身体

Material, Metaphor and the Black Body

《非凡现实主义》展览现场，2024??Fotografiska影像艺术中心

莫哈乌·莫迪萨肯的摄影作品本质上是自传性的。他相信个人即政治, 用服装、道具和自己的身体来表达生命中的创伤与失去，以及种族隔离和后种族隔离时期南非黑人的集体经历。尤其地，他将身体作为表达创伤、失落与抗争的重要载体，反映了历史暴力对个体和集体身份的塑造与影响，探讨自我认同在充满压迫与不公的社会环境中的复杂性和多重性。

Mohau Modisakeng’s photographic work is essentially autobiographical. He believes that the personal is political, using costumes, props, and his own body to address the trauma and loss in his life as well as the collective black experience of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. Particularly, through using his body as an important vehicle to express trauma, loss, and resistance,  Modisakeng explores the impact of historical violence on both individual and collective identities, examining the complexities and multiplicities of selfhood within an environment of oppression and injustice.

观看莫迪萨肯的作品，就如同体验哲学家何塞·吉尔（José Gil）所说的“身体空间”，其中充满了难以察觉的力量，这些力量与艺术家的身体相关，产生着各种各样的情感联系。正在《非凡现实主义》展览展出的作品《变形》以莫迪萨肯的自拍镜头和漆黑背景为特点，他头戴标志性的黑边三角帽，从脸上和胸前抖掉白色粉末。白色粉末的坠落不仅是对种族隔离制度的象征，也暗示着对“洗礼”或“净化”的隐喻，同时呈现出黑人身份在南非历史和社会变革中的“被抹除”与“重构”过程。此外，艺术家的身体似乎正在发生形体上的变化，这种转变状态暗指南非为自我定义而进行的长期民主斗争。整组作品模糊地指向着神圣的仪式、再创造的空间以及超越中间状态的空间。从被动侧身接受白色固体的“洗礼”到主动凝视观众并从口中喷出雾化了的白烟，《变形》中的莫哈乌已然成为后殖民时代南非人精神能动性的一种国族寓言。

To read Modisakeng’s images is to enact what philosopher José Gil usefully conceptualises as the space of the body, which is imbued with imperceptible forces that attain varying feelings in relation to the artist’s body. Metamorphosis (2015), now on display in Marvellous Realism exhibition, features self-portrait of Modisakeng in closeup and against a black backdrop, wearing his signature black-brimmed trilby hat, shaking white powder from his face and chest. The falling white powder is not only a symbol of the apartheid system but also an allusion to "baptism" or "purification," suggesting the erasure and reconstruction of black identity through South African historical and societal changes. Besides, it appears as if his body were physically changing form, in a state of transformation that alludes to South Africa’s long democratic struggle to define itself. This set of photographs ambiguously suggests of sacred rituals, spaces for re-invention and for reaching beyond the liminality of the in-between. From passively turning his body sideways to be “baptized” by the white solid to actively gazing at the audience and emitting atomized white smoke from his mouth, Mohau in Metamorphosis has become a kind of national allegory for the spiritual mobility of South Africans in the post-colonial era.

《非凡现实主义》展览现场，2024??Fotografiska影像艺术中心

《通道》（2017）是一个三通道视频投影，深入思考奴隶制对非洲身份的肢解及其对个人历史的持久抹杀。在作品的三个投影画面中，我们分别面对——一个手臂上挂着一只鹰的女人，一个戴着特比利帽的年轻人和一个裹着巴索托毯子的女人。圆弧形的小船将每个乘客都框住了，他们的头都朝向船头，每个人都带着一件随身物品。当乘客们一动不动地仰面躺着，仰望天空时，他们开始做出一系列动作，时而挣扎，时而顺从。他们的身体下面慢慢地形成了一滩水。水位逐渐上升淹没了船舱，最终将乘客完全淹没，而船只缓慢下沉，最终消失。

Passage (2017) is a three-channel video projection and photographic series that meditates on slavery’s dismemberment of African identity and its enduring erasure of personal histories. In each of the artwork’s three projections, we are confronted with a character – a woman with a hawk perched on her arm, a young man in a Trilby hat and a woman wrapped in a Basotho blanket. The arched shape of the boat frames each passenger with their heads pointed towards the prow of the boat, they are each traveling with a single possession. As the passengers lie motionless on their backs looking up at the sky they begin to perform a series of actions that move between gestures of struggle and resignation. A pool of water slowly forms beneath their bodies. The rising water gradually floods the well of the boat eventually leaving the passengers submerged while the boat is slowly sinking and eventually disappearing.

Passage, Film Still, 2017 ??Mohau Modisakeng

在《通道》中，水的涨落既是生命的源泉，也是致命的，它象征着许多通过贸易抵达或离开南非的人，他们既是货物，也是不属于任何特定国家的过客。1652年，在南非，开普殖民地为了满足日益增长的劳动力需求，建立了契约劳工和奴隶制制度。荷兰殖民者从印度次大陆、印度尼西亚、马达加斯加、东非和安哥拉引进人口，让他们在种植园和港口工作。南非变成了荷兰人和英国人之间的角力场，南非的土著居民在工业化的采矿经济体系中被视为商品，在盎格鲁布尔战争和世界大战中充当劳工和士兵。在塞茨瓦纳语中，生命的经历被称为“通道”，而代表生命的词语“botshelo”意思是“跨越”。因此，所有人类被称为“bafeti”（航行者），这个词指向了生命经历的短暂性；就像任何一次航行一样，它有开始也有结束。

In Passage, the ebb and flow of water, as both life giving and deadly, symbolizes the many who have arrived or departed from South Africa in trade, as cargo or as transient bodies belonging to no particular state. In South Africa, systems of indentured labour and slavery were instituted by the Cape Colony in 1652 to meet the growing demand for labour. Dutch settlers imported people from the Indian subcontinent, Indonesia, Madagascar, East Africa and Angola, putting them to work on plantations and at ports. South Africa became a jostling ground between the Dutch and British, its native people rendered as mere commodities moving through  the establishment of an industrialized mining economy, as labourers and as soldiers in the Anglo Boer and world wars. In Setswana the experience of life is referred to as a ‘passage’. The Setswana word for life, botshelo, means ‘to cross over’. As such, all human beings are referred to as bafeti (‘voyagers’), a word that points to the fact that the experience of life is transient; it has a beginning and an end, as with any voyage.

Passage, live performance?? Mohau Modisakeng 

|超越有限的空间

Beyond the Liminal Space

对于莫哈乌·莫迪萨肯来说，摄影成为一种媒介，将时间扁平化，将观察者和照片的主体联系起来，分割瞬间并将其冻结，因为它宣告了“一种介于我们种族隔离的恐怖过去和我们未能实现的未来理想之间的不确定状态”， 介于观察者的日常现实和南非人民所经历的现实之间。

莫迪萨肯的艺术作品是萦绕在当下的过去的幽灵。在他的作品中存在着现实与虚构、表演与记录的二元性。通过从南非历史中汲取艺术灵感，莫迪萨肯探讨了曾经的残酷光辉——处理种族抹除的叙事，并将黑人、黑人身体和黑人非洲主体置于中心位置, 试图挖掘被人们遗忘的创伤。他坦言道，“我的大部分作品中都贯穿着暴力，这种暴力具有深刻的个人色彩，在很大程度上具有象征意义。这是因为这个国家的黑人不仅在身体上受到暴力威胁，而且在政治、经济、心理和精神层面上也受到暴力威胁。我的作品回应了这段历史所带来的复杂性。” 他的每个项目都讲述着各自的故事，但却同样极具表现力，它们一次又一次地重演着被侵犯的土地的悲剧，以及在资本主义和压迫的庇护下数百万人所经历的苦难。

For Mohau Modisakeng, photography becomes the medium to flatten time, to connect the observer and the subject of the photo, dividing the moment and freezing it as it declared “a state of limbo situated between the horrors of our apartheid past and the ideals of the future which we have failed to obtain”, between the daily reality of the observer and that experienced by the South African people.

The artworks of Modisakeng are salient spectres of the past in a haunted present. There is a duality in his work of reality and fiction, performance and documentation. Molding art from South African history, he looks into the cruel radiances of what has been—addressing narratives of racial erasure and positioning Blackness, the Black body and the Black African subject at the centre. He attempts to dig up the suppressed trauma that people are forgetting about. “The violence that is threaded through most of my work is deeply personal and largely symbolic. This is because black people in this country didn’t only experience violence as a physical threat, but also on a political, economic, psychological and spiritual level. My work responds to the complexities that have come from such a history.” Each project differs from the other with the same expressive power, telling how often we have repeated the drama of a violated land, the suffering that millions of people have experienced under the aegis of capitalism and oppression.

Ditaola, 2014?? Mohau Modisakeng

观众对于莫迪萨肯作品的反应非常积极和多样，它唤起了不同阶层观众的情感共鸣。由于其作品是他处理自己作为动荡社会产物的个人创伤的渠道，因此也能够让观众经历自我反省、痛苦、欢乐甚至宣泄。然而，除此之外，还有一种激发思考的认知体验，这往往会引发重要的对话——涉及历史、政治以及持续的人类经验的艰难辩论。“我的作品从来都不是关于先入为主或已知的东西——每件作品都代表着我对观众以及最终对我自己提出的一个问题（一个出发点）”，莫迪萨肯说，“我让作品的体验以一种主观但又普遍的意义来定义意义。”

The reaction to Modisakeng’s work has been very positive and diverse, and it evokes emotional responses in audiences from different walks of life. Because Modisakeng’s work serves as a conduit through which he processes his own personal traumas as a product of a troubled society, it transports the viewer through self-reflection, pain, joy and even catharsis. However, beyond that, there is also a cognitive experience that stirs up questions, which often lead to important conversations—perspectives on difficult debates relating to history, politics and the ongoing human experience. “My work is never really about something preconceived or known—each work represents a question (a departure) to my audiences and, ultimately, to myself. I let the experience of the work define the meaning in a subjective yet universal sense”, Modisakeng says.

即将闭展：《非凡现实主义》

Closing Soon: Marvellous Realism

2024.8.30 - 2024.12.1

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