2007
Stills from video
Duration 1 min 30 secs, sound

Nandipha Mntambo graduated with a Master’s degree (with distinction) from the Michaelis School of Art in June 2007. In August/September she held her first solo show at Michael Stevenson, exhibiting her distinctive cowhide sculptures and a new series of photographic prints based on her installation Beginning of the Empire. The latter is currently included on Apartheid: The South African Mirror at the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona (until 13 January 2008), travelling to Fundacion Bancaja, Valencia (5 February – 30 April).

Mntambo’s latest works are the start of a long-term project around bullfighting, as well as the artist’s first foray into performance and video. Fascinated by the ritualised action, public spectacle and charged emotion of the bullfight, Mntambo describes the project as ‘the practice of my future’, a tentative ‘feeling out’ of the territory. The video, Ukungenisa (indicating the mental and physical preparation for a fight, and the opening of a path to allow something to happen), captures the artist literally rehearsing the steps of a bullfighter whom she filmed in Lisbon, juxtaposed with footage of the fight and the crowd of spectators. This attempt to take on the persona of the bullfighter represents a shift for Mntambo, whose previous work effectively invited the viewer to take her place, to step into the outline of her body as defined by the moulded cowhide.

In the course of the project Mntambo envisages being trained as a bullfighter and staging her own fight in the abandoned Praça de Touros in Maputo, the arena where black Mozambicans once fought for the entertainment of the colonial Portuguese. To this end she has made herself a bullfighter’s jacket from her signature cowhide, a means to ‘interpret and take ownership of the tradition’. The title of this work, Inftombi mfana, means ‘tomboy’, or a girl taking on a male persona. The cows’ ears that form the rear of the jacket introduce the idea of an imaginary crowd bearing witness to her performance.

Mntambo’s work has been selected for .za: giovane arte dal Sudafrica at the Palazzo delle Papesse in Siena, Italy (2 February – 4 May 2008); and Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body at the Hood Museum, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire (27 March – 7 September 2008).

© 2007 Michael Stevenson. All rights reserved.