Suspecting unified, singular national identities by ‘signifying the impossible song’

The Southern Guild gallery in Los Angeles is presenting a new group exhibition titled signifying the impossible song, bringing together 17 artists from Africa and its diaspora to explore how culture and materiality interact and impact the personal and political projects of constructing national and individual identities.

Curated by Lindsey Raymond and Jana Terblanche, the art exhibition, on view from September 13 - November 14, 2024, draws its name from the poem Our Flag by Carl Adamshick. Like the poem, the exhibition exposes the grand project of unifying, codifying and representing collective identity as a contradictory, violent and impossible task. The artists use sculpture, textile art, paintings and found objects to celebrate the voice of the social chorus in all its discordance, fragmentation and struggle.

Many contemporary art pieces in signifying the impossible song turn to weaving as a metaphor for identity formation. Weaving, often unfairly seen as merely homely, is celebrated in this exhibition as one of the repetitive acts of care and creation that shapes the fabric of everyday life and therefore, culture. Artist Ange Dakouo weaves paper clippings using the traditional techniques of Mali hunters, supplanting the narrative of the clash between tradition and technology with a syncretic collaboration.

Turiya Magadlela from South Africa turns weaving to a more confrontational end, using symbolically loaded fabric—pantyhose, prison sheets, uniforms—to create a visual metaphor for the intersection and exclusion of marginalised identities. Patrick Bongoy from the Democratic Republic of the Congo uses salvaged materials—inner tubes, rubber pipes and metal wires—to explore how economy and labour mediate identity formation.

South African artist Zizipho Poswa’s work meanwhile, is rebellious in its joyfulness and celebration of the local community. Her bronze and earthenware sculpture Fang Ndom, depicts a hairstyle created by her hairstylist in Cameroon, who the work is named after. Like many of the exhibiting artists, she focuses on personal relationships and local, traditional art rather than lionising grand, universal narratives.

Similarly, contemporary artist Lulama Wolf from South Africa turns homeward, to the female-led techniques of vernacular architecture and home decor as a source of artistic inspiration and spiritual strength.

Meanwhile, Usha Seejarim interrogates household objects like the broom in her sculptures, illustrating how the weight of oppressive traditions can transform ordinary objects into symbols and tools of women’s exploitation. Nigeria and Canada-based Oluseye explores the other extreme—rejecting tradition entirely and ‘liberating’ objects from their cultural context—placing symbols of African culture in a vending machine in his artwork Hot Commodity. Both artists illustrate that neither extreme works when reckoning with tradition and collective identity.

Sanford Biggers and Roméo Mivekannin from Ivory Coast/France, move beyond national and continental lines in their art, exploring the possibilities of multiculturalism in defining and redefining identity. They borrow from African and European arts, visual languages and cultures like a music producer sampling fragments of songs. Biggers, an American artist enmeshes the European marble bust with the African mask in his sculpture, Cantor and mixes Japanese origami and African-American quilts to create fabric sculptures enriched by their hybridity. Mivekannin’s approach focuses on disruption rather than integration. He inserts black figures into European oil paintings—such as his riff on the Myth of Orestes—to subvert the power structures symbolised and disguised and to reject identities forced upon the colonised in racist traditions.

Some of the strongest statements and poignant visual condensations of the exhibition’s title are South African artist Inga Somdyala’s canvas flags—Chronicle of a Death Foretold IV and V. The latter is in the colours of the flag of the African National Congress, a leading political party of post-apartheid South Africa while IV is in the colours of the apartheid flag. However, the treatment of the canvas and colours—their tone and ageing—is the same, making them blend, depicting analogues rather than a timeline of progress. By naming the pieces after Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ non-linear novel, Somdyala elegantly points out that while the flag may have changed, much remains the same.

signifying the impossible song is suspicious of unity, singularity and lucidity. While this might initially seem like an anti-humanist message, the artists draw upon tradition, community and assemblage to break through to the freedom that lies beyond convenient signification. The exhibition includes more artworks by Kamyar Bineshtarigh, Nthabiseng Kekana, Nandipha Mntambo, Zanele Muholi, Zohra Opoku and Moffat Takadiwa.

Through the exhibition, the curators ask, “How do you signify an impossible song? What does it mean for choral harmony to be discordant, laboured, flailing? As Adamshick writes in his poem, ‘Our flag should be a veil’. How else does one speak to war, famine, inequality, ecological ruin, gender and race injustice and othering? This is the real – unfathomable, incomplete, endless. Artists and cultural workers graciously assume the perpetual task of representation within an increasingly divisive and violent world. No history, anthology, or census is complete. Similarly, no artistic mission is either.”

‘signifying the impossible song’ is on view from September 13 - November 14, 2024, at Southern Guild Gallery, Los Angeles.

(Text by Srishti Ojha, intern at STIR)