Common Efforts – Intaka Yakha Ngoboya Benye is an exhibition by Lulama Wolf in dialogue with Sonja Ferlov Mancoba. “Intaka Yakha Ngoboya Benye” is an isiXhosa proverb that translates to “A bird builds its nest with the feathers of another bird.”
Eighteen is pleased to present the first major exhibition by Wolf in the Nordic region. The exhibition seeks to drive home the idea that only through each other can we live, breathe, and create. Inspired by the work of Sonja Ferlov Manctova, the exhibition strives to promote community and expression for all, and in the process, Wolf gets to share her DNA as well as her ancestors’ DNA. Common Efforts exposes a new body of work created in dialogue across generations and continents.
Common Efforts borrows its title from the Ferlov Mancoba sculpture Effort Commun, which Wolf mirrors with a proverb in her native language isiXhosa. With this, the exhibition seeks to unite the two artists’ intentions of affirming community and togetherness by exploring the potential of generative difference. While facing the division of the vastness of time and space, Wolf and Ferlov Mancoba share multiple interests. Each balancing between abstraction and figuration, their works investigate different avenues of human expression and bodily experience.
Wolf is concerned with that which she calls “proof of existence.” History carries pain and erasure for previously colonised people, whose accumulated wisdom and art, often remembered and passed on orally through time, was systematically destroyed or omitted after centuries of subjugation. Incorporating crafting techniques as well as spiritual and philosophical ideas of Xhosa art and architecture, Wolf expresses her yearning for answers and clarity in ways that make her blackness clear even when the work is abstract. Her practice embodies subtlety in texture and expression, a curious mix of ambiguity and curiosity.
In the contemporary context in which necessary discussions of artistic representation and ownership are still ongoing, Ferlov Mancoba’s work, and particularly how to frame her sources of inspiration and humanist legacy, is yet a subject of contention. In between the two women artists, however, one thing is clear: The singular, individualistic subject and the confining dialectics of sameness/alienation imposed by Western humanism take a backseat. We are prompted instead to wonder about alternative definitions of humanity, modes of community, and ways of relating to each other – and the natural world. Here, Wolf generously engages with Ferlov Mancoba, returning her ethos of universal compassion and solidarity, combining their artistic visions in a common effort.
Wolf, born in 1993 just before the crack of South African democracy, lives and works in Johannesburg. At the intersection of Neo-Expressionism and Modern African Art, Wolf interrogates the precolonial African experience through the contemporary mind by using smearing, scraping, and deep pigment techniques that were used in vernacular architecture, and the patterns created largely by women to decorate traditional African homes.
She has exhibited widely in South Africa and Europe. Recent exhibitions include Ayakha: Indlela Yokuxola (Rebuilding: The Path to Forgiveness) at the THK Gallery; The Right to Ease at The Breeder in Athens, Greece; and Africa Now: Contemporary Painters at the THK Cologne in Germany.
The exhibition opens on the 23rd of August and will be on view until the 24th of September, 2023.
