“My practice is a recognition that there is a request from those who come before us to articulate our maker’s vision.” An approach that was unknown to her until a recent reflection, Msezane recalls giving in to the urge to make work around statuary from 2013. “Then in 2015, there was a whole student movement around the Rhodes statue. It made me perk up my ears a bit. That’s not something I could have conceptualised,” she admits.

In this same way, Liguqubele iZulu at BKhz was not conceptualised. “To conceptualise kind of implies that it was a planned idea or that it was intentionally formulated. That’s not what happened.” Willed into existence, the exhibition is the result of a slow unfolding for five to six years.

Often site-specific, Msezane’s work disrupts the grief-charged legacies of patriarchal dominance and colonialism. Reasserting black femmes into narratives and physical spaces that have historically erased them, Msezane uses myth-making as a means to construct a comforting feminist history.

“A space of conversations,” between people, gods and guides, Liguqubele iZulu reads like an invitation to occupy multiple planes at once. A portal between the physical and the ethereal, the show materialises spatial fluidity by tearing the veil that separates us. A marker of the tear, which lets entities come and go between planes, the mediums Msezane paints with are not confined to the limits stipulated by frames. Instead the reach out, pouring into our world and beckoning us into theirs.

A storyboard of this period, Liguqubele iZulu begins with a rupturing. A figurative painting with shadows suggesting a fading human silhouette lit by a lone candle, Isililo (a wall/ wailing) marks the genesis of grief marked by transfiguration. Coming to terms with the transference, that the physical realm has come to register as loss, the next painting, Lihlomile iZulu, marks the coming of a dark cloud. A back and forth between physical and spiritual planes, between darkness and light, the next part of the exhibition’s palette marks the bargaining stage of grieving. An auxiliary to the material, the titles, like Yehla Moya Oyingcwele (Descend Holy Spirit) and Bodla (purge) mark a supplication.

“I became well acquainted with mourning and in turn I found comfort in surrendering to the unknown,” she sighs. A radical acceptance of the darkness, the show closes with a light show meant to assert Msezane’s openness to the ambiguities and uncertainties that darkness houses.

While encouraging audiences to negotiate their movements and understand their complicity in the exhibition, presenting Liguqubele iZulu as an immersive installation gives Msezane the opportunity to relinquish control. “It’s the ultimate death of the ego. With all the planning you do, these kinds of installations change over time. It offers me a surrender that other mediums and modes may not,” she concludes.

While encouraging audiences to negotiate their movements and understand their complicity in the exhibition, presenting Liguqubele iZulu as an immersive installation gives Msezane the opportunity to relinquish control. “It’s the ultimate death of the ego. With all the planning you do, these kinds of installations change over time. It offers me a surrender that other mediums and modes may not,” she concludes.