Being complicit implies partnership or participation in an act. It is having the opportunity to disrupt while witnessing an unfolding, but choosing not to. Built into this choice is the assumption of autonomy. Access to opposing schools of information helps to direct autonomous assertions.
While these traits are almost exclusively associated with humans, artists like Sabelo Mlangeni make a strong case against object neutrality by inviting their audiences in to consider the many players in our realities. This month we consider his homecoming exhibition Ngiyobona Phambili.
Perhaps Ngiyobona Phambili is an opportunity to perceive what the seer sees as self portraiture. Mlangeni is a celebrated South African artist working in the medium of photography to queer the way we see things. Informed by an interest in what we understand community to be, Mlangeni spends his days communing with those whose communities he documents. Read in their capacity as a part of the diaspora, Ngiyabona Phambili presents European cities from the perspective of the Africans that make homes in them.
It’s a layered work looking at landscape as my starting point. It’s work that looks at my time in different cities and towns in Europe where I was for artist residencies. In my practice as a photographer, it continues to be important for me
At its core, Ngiyabona Phambili challenges viewers to engage with space through the eyes of the communities that occupy it.
The exhibition showcases a decade’s worth of work (2013-2023) that interrogates how photography can reveal both the visible and the unseen. Mlangeni’s images provoke questions about personal histories of belonging and displacement, prompting viewers to consider how these stories alter our relationship with the concept of Europe. In a time urgently demanding socio-spatial resolution in matters spanning settler colonialism and climate change, Mlangeni’s photographs both confront these realities while celebrating the ephemeral beauty of the landscapes. Together these functions sober audiences to what space can and has done.
More than backdrops, the places in Ngiyabona Phambili are sites of conceptual intervention. To this end, each image serves as a testament to the fragility of identity and the volatile interplay between past and present. In their layering, Mlangeni’s works hold the viewers’ hands through representation and absence. Take the work titled Wall of Wall, Dieppe. An image Mlangeni made in 2016, the work presents its central Johannesburg audience with the story of Dieppe: a coastal commune in northern France. Serene to the eye; what surfaces from context is the city being occupied by German naval and army forces after the fall of France in 1940.