Kay Hassan’s Urbanation

South Africa Wed 04-03-2009

Kay Hassan’s Urbanation
By Andile Magengelele/AfricanColours.net

“African art can be seen as a memory of the past and a reflection of the present. It is the remembrance of the past traditional practise transmitted in a form of objects with function and aesthetic”. (Matsemela Manaka – Echoes of African Art)

‘I am breathing the new air of freedom…..I shall soon know what to do with it’ (E’skia Mphahlele – Down Second Avenue)

Untitled Clothing Installation by Kay Hassan

Kay Hasaan's exhibition entitled Urbanation marks the third in a series of mid-career exhibitions, by South African and African artists held at the Johannesburg Art Gallery.

The first, in 2006, was an overview of work by South African artist Berni Searle, and the second, in 2007 was an exhibition by Meshac Gaba, who lives in Benin and The Netherlands. Hasaan is the third one in the series. Urbanation is relevant title for this exhibition.

Urban as the name suggest pertains to a city – living in a city and Hassan use of the city and its discarded fragments as canvas to explore the paradoxes of this metropolis – the experience of both unbearable invisibility and liberating anonymity; the disconnectedness and its unbounded creativity.

Hassan is thoroughly cosmopolitan or to use the Cameroonian born and Jo’burg based scholar Achille Mbembe’s term – he is ‘Afropolitan’. A no ‘Jim Comes to Jo’burg’(1949) or Rev. Khumalo type, that fictional character of a rural and passive black man (grinning toothless native) depicted in the novel Cry, the beloved country (1948) by Alan Paton.

A character favoured by white liberals and rejected by black people. Lewis Nkosi a literal critic in one of his writings decries this idealized image of a black man: “What was in question was his [Alan Paton] fictional control of African character which produced an ultimate absurdity like Rev. Khumalo: an embodiment of all the pieties, trepidations and humilities we the young had begun to despise with such a consuming passion”.

It was to be his visit to Paris in 1986 which gave him freedom to experience with torn pieces of discarded billboard papers and posters. It was after his return from Paris that he opened his eyes to the environment around him.

A landscape literally and metaphorically littered with discarded ‘material’ which gave him an alternative to art supply store. Hassan relates a story about a lady who used to collect junk: “There was an old lady in Diepkloof, Soweto who used to do environmental pieces.

She scoured township open spaces and garbage dumps to collect junk of found objects…a practice deemed peculiar and everyone thought she was mad”. After I came back from Rorke’s Drift, I went to visit her and was amazed by the work she was producing by placing the found objects together. Little did we know then, that hers was a self expression and she was ahead of time”.

It was soon to be a matter of time before Hassan embarked on his own journey as a ‘scavenger’ picking up found objects; discarded eyeglasses; old vinyl’s, scraps of torn billboard papers and turning them into collages which he calls ‘paper constructions’. Hassan’s technique of ‘tearing’, eloquently articulates the apartheid morbidness of tearing black families apart through its inhumane laws of Group Areas Act.

His works are about displacement yet; placing together the torn pieces of paper can be read as a resilience of fragmented human spirit. Hassan’s proximity to the material fabric of the city and his desire to incorporate it in his oeuvre can be seen in his video entitled Bra Tom (2008), his attention is focused on the city and the ‘faceless’ strangers who wander its streets aimlessly .

They are homesick/homeless and are a melting pot of different images. In the video Bra Tom (2008), we see Bra Tom (his real name) conducting traffic gridlock in a busy intersection. With a red flower protruding in his mouth and hands moving gracefully like an orchestra conductor in a concert hall except that Bra Tom’s hall is the street jammed with motor cars.

Hasaan places Bra Tom on the centre stage of the city’s ‘street opera’ – amidst dilapidated downtown buildings juxtaposed with post-modern corporate headquarters creating a ‘gridlock stasis’.

The city is brought alive and made to move visually thus providing an optical arena of which the shape and contents can be altered at will. Hasaan skilfully captures in line and colour a world which is never still.

The work powerfully evokes an observation made by the French theorist Henri Lefebvre that the: ‘city is a living work of art’. The music scored by the jazz drummer Vusi Khumalo, gives the video a verve and rhythmical timbre of the city in a state of flux

‘As smog smothers the township, Police helicopters enjoy the burial view’ – Lesego Rampolokeng

Kay Hassan grew up in Soweto a sprawling township outside Johannesburg. It consists of a bleak architecture of uniform ‘match-boxes or four-room’ houses which were originally called NE 51/6 (NE stood for Non-European) and designed by apartheid architects Douglas Calderwood and Charlie Berman.

With its sometimes Dickensian atmosphere and a ‘Guernica’ past, Soweto is a township born out of forced removals and police brutalities.

Hassan comes from a generation of artists who cut their creative teeth during the height of Black Consciousness movement - reading poetry of Mafika Gwala, Wally Serote, Sipho Sephamla, Oswald Mtshali – on Staffrider and Classic literal journals. It was also a period of the rise of exile writing of E’skia Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi, Denis Brutus and Alex La Guma.

His artistic journey began as a member of Creative Youth Association (YCA) a cultural group started by the late respected playwright Matsemela Manaka. In his interview with David Koloane Hassan describes YCA as a space where various artistic languages were encouraged “There was theatre, music and poetry…..people would walk into a theatre play that there was an exhibition in the play, and people would appreciate both art forms”. Hassan’s narrative is from his personal experiences.

Using video, photography, installation, ‘paper construction, Hassan’s work is about the coexistence of the work and the viewer’s space, the multiple views, the beginning on the structure provided by the gestalt, the use of distances and continuous spaces, the explorations of new relations to memory, the importance of time and the assumptions of the subjective aspects of perception.

The photographs Untitled (2008) are reminiscent of the abstract expressionist Jason Pollock’s Convergence: Number 10. These photographs display a moment from the past, albeit one that sometimes seems in consent with the present – they are a dizzying clash of Third and First World – plummeting in a colourful splendour of discarded threads, cascading like Pollock’s ‘drip’ technique, swatches of primary colours dominate while other colours play against them – like resounding echoes.

The photographs were taken in Mozambique – as Hassan puts it: “When I was visiting Mozambique I went to the sea to observe a local cleansing ritual. The ritual entails people taking off their clothes and throwing them into the sea in a gesture of cleansing….the clothes are often washed off to the shores and thus create an ecological problem for the sea creatures”. Hassan’s photographs conform to the spatiality close and effective experience of his personal life.

Untitled clothing installation by Kay Hasssan

His immense clothing installations Untitled (2008) physically and conceptually, form the centre of the show. The space is pulsating with piles of second hand clothing covering the entire walls of the gallery and some assembled on the floor resembling a vast kinetic market. The optical and tactile sensation is invoked by the recent history of economic sanctions on apartheid that disrupted not only the clothing industries but rhythms of fashion as well.

Smelling of mists of memories – these ‘second-time around’ can only have power when they are used as keys to unlock the past by forming a symbiosis with their historical context – they have come to represent the only Marshall Plan that Africa got from the former coloniser – the “disregarded fragments” from the Western industrialised nations –whose demands include having a free reign on the African markets where they can dump their goods whilst practising protectionism of the Breton Woods system.

Hassan sees many of the evils of modern society being manifested in the kind of representation – the competitive ethic engendered through, the organisation of human relationships in terms of the discourse of the market place, the central motif of commerce as mediating all social life, the fetishism of commodities.

Abandoned by owners, the clothes are a look into the socio-economical dimension, a link between clothes and human emotional phenomena. Whilst still trying to grapple all of the excess of dumped clothes, one is immediately confronted by video entitled Dump (2007-2008) – the video shows people ‘scavenging’ a dump site.

Rummaging through the waste looking for something to eat, the scene looks apocalyptic with smoking fires on the background dump mountain – like a volcano – a disturbing sight of human poverty and an ongoing economical inequalities still prevailing in post-apartheid South Africa.

His other installation Changing Time, Fixing Time, Healing Time (2007-2008), encapsulates a sense of dislocation even alienation – a suspended weighing pan is filled with old and rusting watches. The poverty of the structure touches the grinding poverty of Africa a ‘Basket Continent’- A continent that has been reduced into a commodity to be weighed.

Kay Hassan’s ‘paper constructions’ have sometimes been compared to Romero Bearden who himself admired Matisse’s paper cut-outs or to a conceptualist artist Christian Boltanski. Unlike Boltanski whose work deals mostly with the past (Holocaust),

Hasaan’s narrative is from his own personal experiences, about sameness and difference - his style of a narrative comes out of this context – as Maurice Marleau-Ponty writes. ‘Style cannot be taken as an object since it is still nothing and will become visible only in the work’.

Too often, creativity is about working within and out from the codes and conventions of styles, in whatever media they manifest. Creative practice cannot then be confined to what is taken as inspirational and radically new.

Even when this occurs, creativity still involves working with recognisable codes and conventions. This entails putting together various texts, sounds, shapes, colours in a recognisably familiar and only slightly different way.

Most of the time it is that element of difference which provokes a critical response, rather than any sudden dramatic changes. Hassan’s source of material for his ‘paper constructions’ has been the ubiquitous billboards blighting the township visual landscape.

His works are made up of torn pieces of billboard paper, deconstructed and constructed on layer upon layer of pixellated paper, ‘gelled’ together to create light and shade on the image he is constructing.

Hassan’s creative powers could be seen in I’nwele, I’nwele (2007-2008), the way he layers his torn pieces - in their thickness and density he sees the expression of the physical manipulation of fragments torn from their designated spaces. The works create a subjective intercutting of multiple layers of stories within stories. His earlier ‘constructions’ like Sheeben (1998) are very cubist.

The features of his ‘persons’ were geometric with sharp jagged line planes. The new ‘paper constructions’ reveal a far more complex and cryptic body of information than first meet the eye - the disjunctions and structure of the language becomes a metaphor or the transformation of the consciousness of everyday life – a site of resistance to the challenges of the modern world.

Through his narrative he links the past to the present, in this way the memory acts as a defence mechanism that ‘nourishes’ and ‘repairs’ minds damaged by the contentions of the present, and allows the sense of psychological continuity to emerge.

His other installation My Father’s Music Room (2008), represent both the exterior signs of black middle class prosperity and the more intimate realms of domestic interiors.

The installation depicts the site of social entertaining, the contested space of opulence. The room is ornate, framed family portraits adorn the walls, with shelves heaving with 33rpm vinyls. The albums are stacked archive style as if to create a counterarchive on a contested space on the margins of official archives.

As Jacques Derrida has argued: “There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory…..the participation in and access to the archive, its construction, and its interpretation”.

On the background a melancholic Dixieland style of jazz emanates from the radiogram creating an ephemeral ambience familiar with township Sunday afternoons. Although restrained….Kay’s message also underlines a more threatening aspect of time and a warning that (a clicking sound) time is running out.

The exhibition tells different stories and experiences – it transformed me as T.S.Eliot puts it: “from a bundle of second-hand sentiments into a person”.

Kay Hassan has exhibited world wide and is represented internationally by Jack Shainman Gallery, New York – whose stable include to name but two, the Ghanaian,

Nigerian based artist El Anatsui and Ramould Hazoume. He was a recipient of Daimler Chrysler Award for South African Contemporary Art in 2000. His works are widely collected by mostly museums and private collections local and internationally.

He rarely exhibits in South Africa citing lack of funding by the galleries. Though he exhibits a lot internationally he still lives in Johannesburg where he finds inspiration.

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