Go Wena, Ka Lorato
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Home is an ambivalent idea—it's meaning migratory and constantly shifting. The validity of our memories is often sprinkled with facts and fantasy such that home is many things; it can be a place you hate to love, but a place you’re called to all the same; a place to rest in the comfort of invisibility yet be very much seen; a place of relief and restlessness in the mundane; a place you imagine and reimagine over and over again.
The group exhibition Go Wena, Ka Lorato (To You, With Love) departs from re-discovering a specific street and “path” in Kanye village in Botswana—as both a geographical and social space. The exhibition invites reflections on the intricacies of memory, remembrance, imagination, and projected futures.
With former glory as the town’s most vibrant meeting place, “Kanye Path” meanders in and out, some of the street's buildings are renovated, others dilapidated and some parts permanently removed over the years. The path has gone through various phases of construction, demolition, and displacement—reminiscent of our own lives. Go Wena, Ka Lorato features artworks from cities: Gaborone, Benin City, Gulu, and Kampala that seek to remember the social history of different places and all the forces that make it.Memory through the works of Onome Ekeh, Isaac Chibua, Ditshupo Mogapi, Piloya Irene, Immy Mali and Boseatleng Katso Sesame Lekgoa contemplate on retrieval of those memories but also interrogate the gaps in between.
Through mapping, paintings, photography, and video; the works highlight entanglements of personal and collective memories of places the artists grew up. The works relay intimate recollections of home, familiarity, sentimentality on missed heritage, and re-imagination of these histories. A love letter to “a place”, Go Wena, Ka Lorato recollects memories, yearns for new ones, and reimagines the possibilities of past and present to meditate a necessary conversation in which unique biographies of places and people are woven, and how this influences how we show up in the world now.
Artwork above: Immy Mali, Dolle Series: a ring, a ring of roses, 2018, digital photography, 5472 cm x 3072 cm, R 38,430.00 ex. VAT printed, R 29,560 digital, Edition Size: 25
Isaac Chibua, Jubilation, 2018, Mixed media; acrylics, charcoal on canvas, 74 cm x 110 cm, R 38,100.00 ex. VAT / $2100.00
FEATURED ARTISTS
EXHIBITION CURATOR, BASADI DIBEELA
Basadi Dibeela is an arts and culture curator, DJ, and freelance arts journalist, Basadi Dibeela’s work centres around arts, innovation, and sustainability. Drawn to villages as much as to cities, she is interested in an expansive and accessible art landscape that does not only look to - but seeks to find new expressions and vocabularies outside of cities and metropolitan areas. She is exploring what critical cultural placemaking looks in the context of a village, and the role of the artist, the curator, and the community in shaping what that could look like.
Previously, Basadi has worked as a strategic planner and programme developer,while serving on the board of the Kgosi Bathoen II Museum in her home village of Kanye, Botswana. As a social entrepreneur, Basadi started the Loselo Kultur Network, an organisation devoted to operating a multi-disciplinary arts and innovation space that encourages critical thinking, ideas exchange, experimentation. Basadi holds a Masters in Arts Journalism from Syracuse University in New York USA, and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Botswana.
Isaac Chibua, The Social Divide, 2020, Mixed media; fibreglass, metal, acrylics, 110 cm x 100 cm, R 34,470.00 / $1900.00
Boseatleng Katso Sesame Lekgoa
Gaborone Main Mall
(NOT FOR SALE)
To enquire about any of the artworks in this exhibition
Latitudes CuratorLab is proudly presented by Rand Merchant Bank.
Further Reading In Articles
African Artist Directory