Nokukhanya Langa

Exhibition : Thursday 25 February → Saturday 27 March

Ballon Rouge Club

Nokukhanya Langa’s “Baby, I’m not even here. I’m a hallucination.” is an exhibition as much as it is an experience. It is an emotional state of being, both perceived and real. Nokukhanya’s practice is defined by her distinct and subversive visual language. She is neither of a school of pure abstraction, nor are her works plainly narrative or figurative. Instead, her works exist in the same space as would vernacular idioms. They are fugitives to direct meaning, and intuitively insinuate. They layer private histories, political and cultural undertones, allegories, seditious narratives, and humor, ultimately revealing themselves. Her work has a multiplicity among them so that a style is never full and her oeuvre is never fully settled; there seems to be an air of dissimilation - things are not totally straightforward; there are hidden meanings and tongue-in-cheek political expressions that are proclaimed as casually and softly as everyday idioms, while equally rife with meaning and intent. Nokukhanya explores repetitive patterns, symbols, and letters - creating a kind of ‘tagging’ similar to those done in graffiti - all of which surmounts to both a jest and gesture toward colloquial language and life. She does this all with a wide-eyed ironic smile, as in the pair of googling eyes seen here and repeated in other works. Her play on materiality is also reflected in her play on the meaning within the works themselves. The overall effect is their agile use of approachable every-day jargon and aesthetics in order to convey the much more subtle and incendiary subtext of the works - a kind of hallucinatory reality.